Identity Crisis

About the Book

“The woman looked at her, staring face-to-face.  Adrienne grasped the candy machine, fumbling for a knob to hold onto, immediately vertiginous: it was the dead woman, the corpse, Andie Shipley.  Locking eyes, boring straight into her, and then the dead woman moved from the pillar and walked toward her.

“Adrienne released the candy machine, grabbed tight to her suitcase, and ran for the train.  With a low metallic groan it was already moving.  She dashed for the door Earl had disappeared into, still open, and from the edge of her vision saw the woman change course to follow.  She sprinted the last few yards and jumped up into the doorway, but her suitcase smacked against the side of the train and wrenched out of her hand.

“Clutching the handrail she spun around, went to her knees, and stretched her free arm out for her bag.  But the train slid away, speed growing, and a second set of hands clasped her luggage instead.  Andie Shipley on her knees beside the bag met eyes again with Adrienne, watched her and the train move out of reach, watched till Adrienne thought both their heads must explode.  Then Andie stood with Adrienne’s suitcase, turned, and vanished back into Betws-y-Coed station.”

Newly unemployed soap opera actress Adrienne Simpson is having some trouble figuring out who she is … and who everyone else is as well.  She’s witnessed a murder from the battlements of an ancient Welsh castle, and when she sees the body up close she finds it disconcertingly reminiscent of herself.  In the night she is visited by a ghost, but it’s not the murder victim — it’s Allison Minor, the character she has played on television for the past four years, whose death scene she came to Wales to film.  For years Adrienne has felt the character of Allison has held her back from becoming the person she might be, and now she discovers Allison, freed by her death, has felt the same way about Adrienne.  And the next day, leaving Wales with the seductive and mysterious man she met at the murder scene, her luggage is stolen from the train station by Andie Shipley, the woman everybody agrees is dead.

After a wild night with her new lover Earl, who has an uncertain connection with Andie Shipley, Adrienne flees to Manhattan.  But Earl follows, Allison reappears, and Andie — dead or alive — takes over Adrienne’s apartment and identity in Los Angeles.  There is no running from the weirdness that has invaded her life, so Adrienne heads for home to confront the truth, and the corpse, head-on.

Full of thrills, romance, and laughs, Identity Crisis takes us into a world where nothing can possibly be what it seems.  … Can it?

About the Author

Scott Campbell has degrees in Film from NYU and Creative Writing from UC Davis. While living in New York, he developed sitcom premises for Martin Bregman Productions and his screenplay I Kill Monsters for Paramount Pictures. His story collection, The Psycho of Happiness, was published last year by Petal Press in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived for a number of years. The book is available from Amazon.com. While in the Bay Area, Scott wrote a sitcom pilot for Fogbank Productions, produced his one-act play “Dean & Daisy” for stage and radio, and worked regularly as a theatre actor. Scott now lives in Seattle, where he has recently finished his new novel, Daisy Parker. In the 2000-2001 season, he will appear in two consecutive plays with The Spokane Interplayers. After that, he will begin work on his next novel.