Title: THE TALKING CURE
Author: Barb Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper
Genre: Urban Fantasy, Spooky, Supernatural, Slow-Burn Romance, (Slow Burn) Romantasy
Book Blurb:
–Zach Cutter claims he’s not really an antiques dealer as such, but that he’s really a supernatural investigator.
–Zach claims he’s got repressed memories, missing at least a year of his life, probably more.
–Zach claims he can do magic. Not stage magician magic– real magic.
–Zach claims he’s got feelings for his new psychiatrist, Dr. Cynthia Mann.
–Zach claims a lot of problematic things.
But they’re all true.
After a disturbing case in New York made Dr. Cynthia Mann wonder if the supernatural might actually be real, she’s started her life and her practice all over again in Cleveland, where she meets a new patient, stranger than any she’s ever met before—and far more charming than anyone she’s ever met, too.
During the progress Zach makes as Cynthia’s patient, he tells her stories about his past, and their relationship slowly edges from a doctor-patient one to a friendship—and Zach clearly wouldn’t mind if it became more.
Together, Cynthia and Zach will eventually have to find a way for him to get out of the trouble he stumbled into long ago…
Excerpt:
One afternoon, just before five-thirty, I’d seen my last patient for the day, and, thinking about the nice cool breeze that was surely waiting outside, I was getting a sort of fallish version of spring fever. I was on the verge of telling my receptionist Kyla to go on home, and then just leaving early myself. “No, Cynthia,” I said to myself, “you have paperwork to do.” I got back to work, finishing typing up my case notes concerning the patient I’d just seen, a young woman with bipolar disorder.
Then I heard a stranger’s voice say, “I didn’t realize that you’d be so young... or so pretty.”
I looked up to see a handsome man standing in my office, by the door. His hair was medium brown, his eyes, light brown. He was wearing a regular white button-up shirt, and blue jeans, with brown leather shoes. He was about 5 foot 10—not tall, but certainly not short. He was about the same age as me, I figured, so therefore seemed like he was in his early thirties.
There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about the man, except perhaps for the fact that he looked rather tired.
I didn’t quite feel... threatened or anything, because his attitude just seemed so... normal. It was like I’d just gotten distracted during the moments when he must’ve opened the door and come into the room. His expression, his body language, suggested that he’d just been there for a moment, that he’d seen that I was engaged in something, and hadn’t been able to decide how to get my attention.
This idea was so convincing, I ignored the fact that I normally heard something when someone entered my office—their shoes against the carpet, a sort of acoustic change when the door opened, a little click that the door’s hinges made, something...
But I’d heard nothing, felt nothing... and was left feeling only a little curiosity. “—How’d you get past my receptionist?” I asked.
“Eh, I told her to go home. That was what you wanted, right?” he answered with an accent that told me he was definitely from the Midwest, as opposed to somewhere more exotic. Something about the way he slipped a sort of tiny, faint “uh” in at the end of “told her-uh to go home,” with a little bit sharper “eye” in his “right” than some people would put...
“...How did you know that I’d been considering taking the rest of the day off?”
“Simple,” he said, “I’m a magician.”
“You mean like a stage illusionist?”
“No, just your average supernatural detective type.”
“Uh...”
“Maybe you should ask me to sit down and tell you what my trouble is.” I did. He slouched in the leather chair in front of me. “I need some sleeping pills,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because there’s some sort of magical creature that’s invading my dreams. Until I figure out how to get it off my back, I need something that’ll knock me out at night without letting me dream. I’m thinking Ambien, or something stronger, if you’ll just prescribe that for me, please. Then I’ll take my prescription slip and be on my way, and you’ll never have to think about the strange man who came into your office without an appointment ever again.”
Well, I wasn’t about to give a prescription to a complete stranger, especially not with a story like that. “Why’d you pick me to come and see, Mister...?”
“Zach Cutter. It used to be Zach Lansky, but I changed it after... what happened.”
“...After what happened?” I asked. Mr. Cutter pulled up his sleeve. I saw the scars of a failed suicide attempt. “How...” I stopped. How was sort of obvious. “Why...?”
“I did this after Celeste died.”
“Celeste?”
“...Celeste was my girlfriend. And she was a gifted psychic. We were investigating a haunted house case... only it turned out that the house was chock-full of the most vicious, pissed-off ghosts ever. Six of the people who went into that house that day ended up dead—and no, it wasn’t me who murdered any of them. Some killed each other... some, no one could even figure out what could have caused what happened to their bodies. Christ, it was awful. They locked me up for months, after I got out of there, for my own good... and I needed that time, considering the things I saw...”
“...Oh. ...I’m sorry to hear that.”
“...That’s not what you’re really thinking.”
“...Isn’t it?”
“You’re thinking, ‘this guy is a danger to himself, and maybe others.’ But let me tell you, Cynthia, about a fourth of the magicians I know have been under observation for some serious mental health issues at one time or another. Magic is a very stressful job.”
“Dr. Mann.”
“Pardon me?”
“We’ve just met. Maybe in a few sessions, we can start calling each other by our first names, but... it’s nothing personal, it’s just... I am supposed to be the doctor here.”
“Oh, sorry. Now, about my sleeping pills, Dr. Mann...”
“No, I can’t give you that prescription.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because so far, I don’t believe a word of your story.” Honestly, so far, he sounded sincere, but based on the things he was telling me, I wondered if he was just testing me, to see what sort of person I might be, what my reaction would be to the kinds of things he was telling me...
“Um...” said Mr. Cutter. “May I ask you why you don’t believe me? I mean, you’d take other patients’ stories at face value. You’d give them the benefit of the doubt.”
“That’s because my other patients’ stories tend to make sense.”
“You don’t believe in magic?”
“Let’s say I’m an open-minded skeptic. If you can prove to me that magic exists...”
“You want me to do a magic trick?”
“Yes, that might help.”
Buy Links (including Goodreads):
What makes your featured book a must-read?
Barb answers: “The Talking Cure is a must-read because it's an episodic novel, so one can read a complete adventure in a chapter, then come back to the book when one has more time to do so. One of the main complaints modern readers have about books nowadays is that there is ‘no time to read.’ So, an episodic novel means that a reader can binge-read the episodes, OR one can read the book in spurts. The Talking Cure is a smart, sexy Romantasy with witty, believable characters, spooky stories, a haunted car that steals the show, and unexpected plot twists. It's like Buffy for grownups or Supernatural rethought of as a romantic dramedy. Of course, one doesn’t have to read it slowly—since we’ve also been told that readers ‘can’t put it down’ and that it’s easy to finish in a weekend-- but also that it stays with you for a long, long time...”
Giveaway –
Enter to win a $25 Amazon gift card:
Open Internationally.
Runs November 12 – November 21, 2024.
Winner will be drawn on November 22, 2024.
Author Biography:
Barb, originally from Minnesota, grew up to become a guitarist/singer-songwriter and got an album put out on the Imp label. However, she also had health issues: chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and extreme environmental sensitivities and allergies. (She also has complex post-traumatic stress disorder due to issues that happened in her youth.)
Park, from central Texas, grew up reading a great deal of comic books, and science fiction and fantasy literature. He stopped reading comics, started again when they got cool, and then someone in the letter columns of the comic Sandman announced that they were doing a fanzine for readers of that comic. Barb and Park both wrote in.
Barb and Park became aware of one another… Park liked the writing Barb submitted to the fanzine, and he wrote to Barb, and they began writing to each other. Then they started talking on the phone… they fell in love… they started visiting one another…
Reader, they got married (to each other).
They wrote about popular culture in columns on the internet... then they started adapting and editing manga for major American publishers importing manga (and sometimes their South Korean and Chinese counterparts) from the far side of the Pacific... Near the end of this, Barb and Park wrote the manga pitch The Hidden for TokyoPop, perfectly timed to appear the week that that company fell apart.
Then Barb and Park wrote the sci-fi vampire graphic novel Half Dead, co-published by Marvel Comics.
Somewhere around this time, Park successfully completed his Ph.D. in literature, and then Barb and Park started writing other projects, prose and comics, both together and independently. More recently, Barb and Park had a successful Kickstarter (with all stretch goals reached) for Hungry Ghosts, their project involving the work of Lafcadio Hearn and his writings about Japanese folklore.
These days, Barb and Park live happily together in Austin, Texas.
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