Sainted in Error

by Glenda Winders

Overview

What do you wear when you testify against your best friend as she goes on trial for murder?



As Maggie Patterson runs her hand over the clothes in her closet and muses about the prosaic details of preparing for a shockingly personal murder trial, she is catapulted into the memories that led her to this moment. Piece by piece, she assembles the fragments of her past to make sense of a violent crime, the echoes of which ripple through her recollections.



Maggie and Cynthia meet as college freshmen and are seemingly destined to be best friends for life. As the years pass, however, Maggie's marriage and career lift her to success and wealth while Cynthia's jealousy and untreated mental illness cause their relationship to disintegrate. As the stories of the two women's lives unfold, Cynthia's paranoia and anger sour every relationship she has and turn even the people who have loved her most against her, ultimately bubbling over into an event that Maggie never sees coming.



Not a murder mystery in the usual sense, and spanning time and space, Sainted in Error delves into the tenacity of friendship and the damage that the stigma still attached to mental illness can do.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781645439103
Publisher:	Subplot
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	305
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Glenda Winders is an award-winning fiction writer, editor, and journalist, whose work has appeared in major magazines and newspapers nationwide. Her first novel, The Nine Assignments, was published in 2016. She lives with her husband in Columbus, Indiana.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2021-11-19
In this novel, a woman’s longtime friend suffers an undiagnosed mental disorder for years, culminating in violence and murder.

Maggie Patterson first meets Cynthia Morgan in 1973 when they become college roommates. The UCLA freshmen are polar opposites—Cynthia is a wealthy conservative; Maggie is a liberal Vietnam War protester. Despite their differences, they grow close in a relationship lasting beyond the university. But Maggie can’t help but notice Cynthia’s sharp changes in mood, oscillating between aloofness and acts of kindness. As adults, Maggie envies both her pal’s marriage to a doctor named Richard and her new role as a mother, while Cynthia’s jealousy of her friend’s budding journalism career borders on resentment. This spurs hateful comments, an early sign of their deteriorating relationship. Both Maggie and Richard suspect Cynthia is mentally ill, as her mother had been bipolar. But Cynthia refuses psychological treatment and only gets worse, accusing Richard of infidelity and threatening to kill him. She even has a gun stashed somewhere, which her loved ones desperately search for. Maggie can’t decide if she should help her close friend or steer clear of her. Unfortunately, it’s just a matter of time before Cynthia erupts. Winders opens with narrator Maggie preparing to testify at Cynthia’s murder trial (“What do you wear when you testify against your best friend as she goes on trial for murder?It’s ridiculous that I’m so anxious over such a minuscule and trivial part of this whole nightmare”). Readers do not know the victim’s identity, which imbues the story with ample suspense as the narrative builds to the fateful day. This reinforces an already riveting tale of a woman’s mental collapse. Cynthia’s story is sad and unnerving; she tragically lost her mother at a young age, but this sympathetic woman turns outright malicious and frightening as the years pass. The author masterfully propels readers through several decades in a grim, well-crafted drama that occasionally teases things to come, like Maggie’s own marriage and someone’s betrayal. Notwithstanding the novel’s persistently somber tone, Maggie’s tireless optimism provides a glimmer of hope—for herself as well as readers.

A gripping, indelible tale of the unrelenting anguish that psychological afflictions cause.

Kirkus Reviews