What if the man you'd loved for years vows when you leave him, to destroy you ? What if he transforms into a ruthless tormentor, stealing your freedom, undermining your sanity, and threatening your safety ?
This is not a fictional scenario. It is Kate Brennan's life.
Kate is a well-respected writer and scholar, a highly independent woman with simple tastes and a complicated romantic past that leave her perfectly content with singlehood. So when she meets Paul - a wealthy, charismatic businessman with a great deal of free time - she's weary of getting involved. Eventually, though, his polished charm and relentlessness wooing win her over.
Things move quickly, and it is only after the two have moved together that Kate discovers the serial infidelity, the unbalanced psyche, and the sordid secrets lurking under the Mr. Right facade.
Kate lets Paul into her life with trepidation, and when she ends the relationship, she finds she can't get him out of it. With limitless resources, he dedicates himself to stalking her: he tracks her movements, arranges for people to break into her home, interferes with her work, and even relocates to her new neighborhood. His harassment lasts for more than a decade and, as Paul is still at large, it continues to turn Kate's life upside down today.
This visceral memoir not only lays bare the mind of a stalker, but also shows how smart, successful women can fall prey to a warped and powerful man who has the memory and connections to keep her under his watchful eye. Both frightening and insightful, In His Sights is a gripping tale of one woman's descent into the dark side of love and how she has fought - and still struggles - to free herself.
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Kate Brennan is an alias used to protect the author's identity. She has been a freelance writer (under her real name) for more than thirty years, with a focus on women's issues. She has also taught English and women's studies at a number of
colleges. Her stalker remains at large.
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Personally, I wouldn't want to rate a book like this. Kate Brennan tells about her life in a very analytical way that shows the reader she's had more then a decade time to think about the man who's stalking her and to think about herself.
Raised in a catholic family her mother taught her to value marriage and love through enduring humiliation and verbal abuse by a drunken husband. Having learned to keep her distance from men that consume alcohol, she found a man who seems to have everything but presumably suffered from the loss of his father who was tortured and murdered.
The problems with Paul soon evolved in secrecy and unfaithfulness. Deeply disturbed he shows signs of obsession with the killer of his father and his conviction. He developed a sexual addiction which keeps him away from Kate.
Kate takes pity on him every time, takes action in bringing him to counseling but finally decides to leave him.
She herself describes her life as before Paul, with Paul and after Paul. The after Paul is a still ongoing life with fear and security measures. Since 1994 Paul is following her wherever she goes. With his inherited money he's got ways and means to pay people to frighten and watch her and intrude into her life with every imaginable way.
PTSD, panic attacks, nightly listening to sounds, sleeping fully closed, always being prepared to leave the place she's living in, she lives a life of being prey to a dangerous, unpredictable man.
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It is difficult to fathom all this or to even understand why she let it come so far in the beginning but who would imagine to find something like this in the man she thought she loved ?
Although I had a stalker in my life as well and have a rudimentary imagination of what she went and still is going through, I could never imagine to endure this torture for years.
While reading I faced my own fears which seem to have happened so long ago and I felt lucky that in the end I was able to get out of my own misery. Compared to her I had an easy way out.
I felt for her with every new turned page and I wish her all the best and share her deepest wish wholeheartedly.
I found a very interesting, deep interview with Kate Brennan.
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Harper (August 5, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0061451606
ISBN-13: 978-0061451607
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