Third & Forever

Walking the familiar beat on Ballard Avenue with her partner, Katherine Murphy, Seattle Police Officer Grace Stevens walks through time as well, recalling her special childhood game of sidewalk hopscotch that she once played on this same street—a game with self-constructed, secret rules that she would never break. Grace’s longing for unbroken rules and for a kind of perfect balance is just that—a longing that can survive only in her inner world. For beyond the known streets of her childhood, beyond the brawls in fishermen’s taverns, beyond the domestic travails and routine calls that fill her working days, Grace is haunted by the shadowy presence of a rapist. As she pursues this elusive figure, she will find herself far from the streets of her Ballard neighborhood. In Lowen Clausen’s newest novel, Third & Forever, Grace Stevens delves into the dark world of sexual compulsion and begins a search that strips away layers of conformity, pretense, and expectation so that she must see herself and her society anew. Circling from her neighborhood beat to the University of Washington campus and on to steamy Baton Rouge and back, she will discover that some athletic stars are given special protections—especially those playing big-time college football—the money-makers for their universities’ athletic machines. Despite a series of near misses, Grace moves steadily toward unmasking a dangerous stalker. And along the way she finds her own identity and purpose transformed by her encounter with her family’s black roots in the South.