Northern New York – June 20, 2025 – Author Marguerite Mooers, who has quickly emerged as the voice of emotional intelligence in crime fiction, gives her most intimate and powerful work to date with A Casualty of Hope. The book is the story of Bernie Robertson, a woman running from the aftermath of domestic violence, as she searches for her birth mother in the midst of Texas–only to realize that the truth about her past was much uglier.

The novel opens with Bernie's brash break from an abusive marriage and start in Texas. Her sole hint is a tidbit of information indicating she is adopted. The result is a cross-country journey for identity that quickly devolves into a psychological thriller one where memory, betrayal, and maternal ties intersect. Against the Texas landscape and shadowed by traumatic memories, the novel investigates how the past never really gets buried.

Mooers builds Bernie's emotional world with raw emotion. As she investigates her beginnings, her nightmares grow more turbulent implying that she might have suppressed a horrific memory, one associated with an ancient offense. With intuition and pieces of the past as her only guides, Bernie is compelled to face a horrific possibility: that the person she's been seeking might be connected to a catastrophic act of violence.

"I wanted to give voice to survivors their confusion, strength, and ultimately, their clarity," Mooers says. "Bernie isn't trying to run from her past. She's trying to understand it, to rewrite it on her own terms."

A Casualty of Hope defies the conventions of genre. It's part character study, part conspiracy thriller, part suspense novel, and part introspective exploration of the human heart. Mooers's skill at interweaving tension with emotional veracity makes the book stand out in a saturated marketplace. It provokes the reader to think about the way we build memory, what trauma can erase or conceal, and how recovery involves confronting what we most fear.

This seems a clear evolution of Mooers's work. Her earlier books Take My Hand and The Shelter of Darkness were about law enforcement and small-town crime, whereas A Casualty of Hope turns the focus inward. Mooers transitions from the detective's perspective to that of the survivor's, and invites readers into the inner space of a woman who has vowed to reconstruct her life.

Early reviews have praised Mooers's masterful characterization and slow-burning suspense. The novel has been called "hauntingly beautiful," "psychologically rich," and "impossible to put down" by readers. A reviewer wrote, "Mooers doesn't just write about trauma she writes about survival, and she does it with heart and grit."

A retired prison instructor, Mooers is responding to her years of teaching people who are dealing with actual adversity. Her background in correctional education underlies not only the material of her fiction, but also the empathy with which she presents them. She writes fiction with a social conscience emphasizing the nuance of justice, the effects of violence, and the strength of the human spirit.

About the Author

Marguerite Mooers is a retired teacher, author, and watercolor artist who resides in Northern New York. She has written five novels, among which are Take My Hand, The Shelter of Darkness, and The Girl in the Woods. Aside from writing, she also instructs watercolor painting and remains active with local lifelong-learning networks. She lives with her husband, Richard, and is a grandmother to four.

Availability

A Casualty of Hope is now published in paperback and e-book form by Amazon, Draft2Digital, and Google Play. The book maintains Mooers's reputation for crafting novels that combine emotional realism with thrilling suspense.

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