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Butcher of Dreams
by Kay Williams, Eileen Wyman
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Calliope Press (2007-07-01)
ISBN: 0964924161
EAN: 9780964924161
Dewy Decimal #: 813
Paperback: 416 pages
SKU: N1002
Condition: Very Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
LEE FAIRCHILD HAS REALIZED EVERY ACTOR'S DREAM--A THEATER OF HER OWN. HER DREAM IS ABOUT TO TURN INTO A NIGHTMARE. It doesn't matter, Lee tells herself, that the theater sits in Hell's Kitchen on the seedy fringes of Times Square, that it's under-budgeted and understaffed and that she (as Administrative Director) will play only one role this first season. It's an Equity theater, offering five plays in repertory. Times Square redevelopment makes the property desirable. With her husband recently dead and her daughter away at college, Lee falls into a passionate affair with a younger man. Bizarre, seemingly unrelated events--beginning with a homeless person found dead on the third floor of the theater--escalate to ritual murder. Playful improvisation becomes a deadly game. Qualities that make her a good actress--imagination, empathy--pull her through the looking glass into a nightmare world, to the brink of death. Over all hovers a Mexican mask, stolen from the tomb at Monte Alban, its eyes glittering with secrets of the ancient Aztecs and sacrifice. The characters are based on the authors' extensive experience in theater and film. Alan Dunbar, Lee's Artistic Director, has troubling gaps in his resume; Ernst Kromer, her other director, is rigid and uncooperative. Other major characters are: Michael Day, Lee's sexy and mysterious assistant; wraithlike Fleur Mahoney, whose first role is a dead girl--and she almost is; Barry Blackwell, talented actor, compulsive practical joker; Harry O'Brien, company stage manager, who'd kill for a role. Characters from the "real" world include Alan's lover, Walter Kaplan, eccentric psychiatrist and medical anthropolo¬gist; Heather, Lee's 18-year-old daughter, who has a surprising secret life; pock-marked, cynical NYPD Detective Mordecai Green, who moonlights as an actor.
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Customer Reviews
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Applause! Applause!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-03-20
I enjoy theater and suspense stories with a strong sense of place.
I loved Kay and Mardo Williams' previous book, One Last Dance: It's Never Too Late to Fall in Love. So, naturally, the possible combination of these delights in a new novel, Butcher of Dreams, caught my attention.
Co-authors Williams and Wyman are masterful "set designers" who have recreated Manhattan's hellish Hell's Kitchen of the 1980's in redolent detail. It is the perfect stage for heroine Lee Fairchild to construct her Off (off, off) Broadway repertory theater and for violent plots and romantic subplots to unfold.
When the curtain rises on Chapter One, we are immediately introduced to a parallel narrative, set off in italics, involving an unknown being who "feels the breeze from unknown wings" and hears "the tic, tic of two heartbeats". This real time device vividly contrasts the busy, direct, matter of fact reality of Lee Fairchild with a second menacing "surreality"; when these worlds intersect,
the consequences are shattering.
If I have any reservations, it is that the authors' keen ears for dialogue and their love for denizons of theater and the Big Apple prompted them to include one or two too many characters in the cast. Other than that, I applaud every page of Butcher of Dreams.
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Step into the Life of a Stage Actor
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-02-04
This book was quite different from One Last Dance, a book Kay Williams, along with her sister, finished for their dad after he passed away.
It has been a while since I finished the book, and what sticks out in my mind is that the author provided excellent descriptions of places. I felt as if I were there along with the characters, hearing the sounds they heard and seeing the objects they saw.
The character development was also very good. The reader was given enough information about each character to feel as if those characters were actual acquaintances of the reader.
This is not the type of book that I usually read, but I did enjoy stepping into the world of New York actors for a short while. However, I didn't like walking to that New York parking lot alone late at night when I knew it was a high-crime area.
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Chilling and tanalizing mystery tour-de-force
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-12-13
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (12/07)
I've always loved mysteries. If I had to read just one genre for the rest of the days, I believe my choice would be the immensely entertaining field of mystery and suspense. I like the short, cozy British ones, adore the old classics and fall easily under the spell of the more contemporary ones. A lot of the new ones, though, fall short in the "thrill factor" area - they tend to be unnecessarily graphic in their shocking descriptions, yet they do not make me truly afraid and even less truly perplexed.
Kay Williams' and Eileen Wyman's "Butcher of Dreams," aptly subtitled "A Suspense Novel about the Theater," was one of the really thrilling mysteries. No matter how much I tried to guess who the villain was, the authors managed to sidetrack and blindside me again and again. While I correctly guessed one of the subplots, the main mystery remained so until the chilling end of the book.
Lee Fairchild, a talented actress, is managing a rather fledgling theater in NYC's Hell's Kitchen. She is a strong, courageous and smart woman, yet weakened by the recent death of her husband and a crumbling relationship with her only child, Heather. The theater has its own share of problems, starting from the motley crew on its payroll and continuing to its not-so-desirable location, lack of future funding and strange happenings in the area. When a dead vagrant is found in the theatre, his body mutilated in a ritual-looking manner, Lee enters a bizarre world of unexplainable events, all of which threaten the further operations of the theater as well as the lives of crew and cast. Will Lee manage to solve the mystery - or will she become the next victim?
"Butcher of Dreams" by Kay Williams and Eileen Wyman delivered on all the fronts that I consider important for a good mystery book. The writing was tight and precise. The characters were amazingly detailed and believable, with their back-stories intricately weaving in and out of the main story line. None of them were totally good or totally bad, which made them all the more human and the reading more pleasurable. The mystery remained mysterious to the very end of the book. And the book was scary enough that I did not want to read it when I was alone in the house.
Utterly enjoyable, "Butcher of Dreams" is a book I would wholeheartedly recommend to any lover of well-written mysteries. If that person happens to like the theater and NYC, they will enjoy it even more. Kay Williams and Eileen Wyman have made my list of authors to watch in the future and I am eagerly awaiting their next book.
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Lee - a "real" person
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-10-10
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This "who done it" mystery grips the reader from the start with its cast of possible villains, but beyond that, the authors have created main character Lee Fairchild with whom everyone should be able to identify. In her heart Lee knows of whom to be weary, but because of her emotions, she finds the best in all of her colleagues. How many of us have faced the same dilemma? De-Nile is not just a river in Egypt, but a real, if ineffective, coping device of human beings, and vulnerable Lee falls into the chasm of denial, causing her to justify behaviors of others rather than face them head-on. Even as I worried over her physical safety, I related to the emotional stresses she faced, making her seem "real" rather than a character in a novel.
Besides the effective characterizations of Lee and her colleagues, the authors have written a book that offers insight into the world of theater that I never knew existed. It has given me an enhanced appreciation of the "art" of theater and has encouraged me to support repertory theater productions within my community. Plus, the novel is simply good reading, one that's hard to put down. Just as the cover grabbed my eyes, the words grabbed my passion for reading. Don't miss this book!
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gripping thriller
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-09-14
Butcher of Dreams is one of those "who dun it" mysteries where you supect everyone and you just can't put it down once you start reading. And, interestingly enough, as I carried it around, many people asked about the book because of its intriguing title and cover. The book does not disappoint. I ended up finishing it late one night in bed with my heart pounding! It is an exciting, scary and satisfying thriller!!
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