Chance

Book excerpt: "Dr. Eldon Chance is a man primed for spectacular ruin. His wife has left him for a dyslexic fitness instructor, his teenaged daughter is disappearing into drugs; he owes the IRS untold sums; his neuro-psychiatry practice has been reduced to analyzing people with brain injuries on behalf of insurance companies. He drinks too much. His work is repetitive, disturbing, and devoid of emotional satisfaction. And things are about to get worse. Into Dr. Chance's blighted life walks Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused, attractive wife of an Oakland homicide detective, a violent and jealous man. To say that Chance is smitten is one thing, to say that he has no idea who he is really dealing with is quite another. Jaclyn appears to be suffering from an apparent dissociative identity disorder. In time, he will fall into bed with her--or it is with her alter ego, the voracious and volatile Jackie Black? The not-so-good doctor, despite his professional training, isn't quite sure--and thereby hangs his fascination with her. She unnerves him. He likes being unnerved. But when you get Jaclyn, you get her husband Raymond, a formidable and dangerous adversary. Meanwhile, Chance also meets a young man named "D," a self-styled Samurai and street-wise philosopher skilled in the art of the blade. It is around this trio of unique and dangerous individuals that long guarded secrets begin to unravel, obsessions grow in intensity, and the doctor's carefully arranged life comes to the brink of implosion. Amid San Francisco's fluid, ever-shifting fog, in the cool, gray city of love, Dr. Chance will at last be forced to live up to his name"--