Big Driver

The main character of this story is Tessa Jean, a writer and a journalist of a local newspaper. She takes a ride to a writers' meeting in another town and, following her editor's advice to take a short cut, gets into a trap set by a rapist - the Big Driver. Almost dead, she manages to get home, and that night a new woman is born, a woman who decides not to go to the police, but to take revenge by herself and to save other possible victims in future.

In the calm morning light of a suburban Connecticut morning, the answer was ridiculously simple: an anonymous call to the police. The fact that a professional novelist with ten years’ experience hadn’t thought of it right away almost deserved a yellow penalty card. She would give them the location—the deserted YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU store on Stagg Road—and she would describe the giant. How hard could it be to locate a man like that? Or a blue Ford F-150 pickup with Bondo around the headlights? 

But while she was drying her hair, her eyes fell on her Lemon Squeezer .38 and she thought, Too easy-as-can-beezy. Because… 

“What’s in it for me?” she asked Fritzy, who was sitting in the doorway and looking at her with his luminous green eyes. “Just what’s in that for me?”

Armed with her Smith & Wesson Lemon Squeezer, she goes to her editor, a woman who sent her into the  trap, and finds out that she is Big Driver's mother, and that she was the one who planned it. Tessa kills her and finds the address of her son, who shares a truck company with his brother.

She goes to his house and waits, when the car shows up in the driveway, she decides to act, and when the truck stops she opens the doors and shoots the driver. But suddenly she understands that it isn't Big Driver, but his brother - Little Driver, as she calls him.

Then she goes to Big Driver's house and kills him too, but she feels guilty for killing an innocent man and decides to write a confession and commit a suicide, but her inner voice tells her to check Little Driver's house first. There she finds her purse that the rapist has stolen, with a dozen other purses. She burns the confession and heads for home.

In this story the concept of the Conniving Man is not expressed through characters' speech. The heroine has a habit of making up voices in her everyday life because she feels lonely. And when her personality breaks, her dark side talks to her through different inanimate objects around her, mostly through her GPS receiver, that she programmed to use the voice of her favourite writer. Unlike the old Tessa, her new personality is observant, calculating and confident. The moments she wants to stop or feels afraid, the voice persuades her that she's doing the right thing and provides a lot of arguments that she can't resist.