SAVANT by Sebastian Gerard

It had been over twenty years since beautiful young French actress, Isabelle Massot, was murdered in the nursery of her San Diego apartment. But the only witness to the crime--their four-month-old baby daughter--Jeanne-Marie, knew the perpetrator. Jeanne-Marie, thanks to a wealthy French grandfather, ended up a patient for over two decades at San Diego's Hilltop Mental Hospital, where she became known by the sobriquet "Jemma," had not spoken a word since the day she arrived. Jemma was never diagnosed with a psychological disorder that accounted for her aphasia, nor was there a somatic reason that she spent all of her waking hours in a wheelchair. But after a treatment of electroconvulsive therapy at age twenty-one Jemma--self-educated and fluent in French--began composing a narrative on the computer that would perhaps disclose the unknown identity of the perpetrator in her mother's death. The Hospital was thrown into a turmoil when an attempt is made on Jemma's life and a priest's attempted exorcism, but they only provoke new speculation about her cognitive abilities, particularly that she might be autistic, and someone possessed of "savant syndrome," a totally unique mentality of perfect recall. As the case of Jemma becomes publicly known her virtual anonymity is erased in the limelight of media interest, the ambitions of some of those responsible for her care, and dark characters from her past. One of them is her father, Charles Archer who disappeared into Mexico. But now Archer has returned to seek reunion with the daughter he knew only as a baby. But there are no certainties in Jemma's mysterious universe in which she is orbited by an ambitious administrator, a clever neurologist, a celebrated documentarian, a retired cop, and a Roman Catholic priest. Sebastian Gerard has woven a cast of characters with different and conflicting motivations, united only by the ways in which their fates may be ordained by the unfathomable mind of a mystifying savant.