Time's Harlot: Corrosive Jealousy Blossoms Into a Poisonous Suffocating Weed (Sophia Werniczewski Thriller) / Brenda Kuchinsky

A capricious affair and a poisonous past.

When Sophia, a South Beach psychotherapist, decides to give up her lucrative second profession, she upsets her equilibrium. She has been catering to the sexual needs of the Mamma's Boys of Miami Beach since her husband's murder two years ago, when he left her destitute. Now she is rolling in money but depleted in spirit. She meets Maria, a magnetic woman who draws her into an unprecedented affair. An affair characterized by unpredictability, danger, and instability. Sophia is hooked.

Sophia's life is further complicated by her parents, Holocaust survivors who keep stumm about their past. Divorced in their sixties, living in the same ramshackle apartment building on the beach, and leaning on Sophia heavily, her parents make Sophia feel she is the parent and their roles are reversed. Ada, her mother, is enthralled with her decades-younger, gay boyfriend, Rudy while Max, her father is infatuated with the flirtatious histrionic Mathilde, a fellow survivor. Sophia is not so sure Rudy and Mathilde aren't malignant forces in her parents' lives.

While Maria is becoming more and more enmeshed in Sophia's life, Sophia meets a man who becomes her new love interest. Will Maria give her up without a struggle?

Time's Harlot, set in 1999, fifteen years prior to Time's Hostage, elucidates Sophia's paradoxical self-destructive and caregiving nature, two warring forces within her, often causing her to ride a roller coaster of battling emotions. Her caring can deplete her and become a ruinous force. Will she disentangle herself from Maria and her parents' emotional hornet's nests? Can a self-defeating caregiver begin to care for herself? Life is full of surprises.