My name is Julia
  
  
   
             
ulia Kendall lives and works at Garden City, a city about an hour's drive from New York.
She works as a criminologist. She's just over thirty years of age, with short dark hair, and huge, very expressive dark eyes. She's a far cry from the stereotype of the top model, as she has natural elegance, a slim figure with a highly-strung air like Audrey Hepburn, and although you wouldn't call her a classical beauty, her features make her decidedly attractive. She wears only light makeup, and she favors casual but smart clothing (her preference is for trouser suits with a blouse and blazer), but when the occasion calls for it she has a number of glamorous outfits to wear. She lives in a pretty early twentieth-century home on the outskirts of Garden City. Julia's hobbies are 1940s cinema and music.
She's a thoroughly modern woman, with a modern outlook on life and personal relations. Recently she's has several short but very emotional love affairs, and this has left her with a natural aversion to long-term relationships. As far as she's concerned, sex is the complement to a relationship, not an end in itself.
She owns a 1967 white Morgan 4/4 bianca, with leather upholstery. This is not an eccentric foible of hers: she was forced to accept it as payment for professional services rendered.
Her work involves two different aspects. Firstly, she has a teaching appointment at the local university
where she's succeeded in establishing a relationship of mutual esteem and trust with her students. Criminology is an interdisciplinary science based on psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, law… In other words, it's a complex subject that needs to be explained in plain English. And her lessons are so crystal-clear that even a beginner can understand. Secondly, as a freelance professional, she does consultancy work for public figures or private citizens. But in most instances she is entrusted with cases directly by the local court and she works together
with the police. Julia's investigative method relies not only on her scientific background but also on her personal instinct, an amazing flair and sixth sense that enables her to identify emotionally with whatever criminal she's trying to track down. So she can often anticipate the criminal's next moves or figure out the motives that triggered the criminal behavior. The cases she finds most interesting are those involving criminal psychopathology, the classic associations of sex and
delinquency or drugs and delinquency, violent murders, the proliferation of serial killers, the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency. Of course, her aim is to make sure criminals are brought to justice, but she is also deeply interested in understanding - understanding, not justifying - the underlying pulsions that drive criminals to act the way they do. In fact, if there were such a category, she might be described as an Investigator of the Soul. The Julia stories are also characterized by the presence of a first-person narrator, a device dear to the Californian thriller-writing tradition; here, it allows us to gain insight into the workings of the protagonist's mind, rather like reading a diary, so that the events are experienced vividly with a sense of immediacy.

 

HER LOVED ONES

She lives with a Persian cat, Tony, and a combative
home help, friendly Emily.