Roused by a single drop of blood on the bedsheet, Rosie Daniels wakes from fourteen years of a nightmare marriage and suddenly takes flight. She uses her husband's ATM card to buy a bus ticket, determined to lose herself in a place where Norman won't find her. She'll worry about all the rest later.



Alone in a strange city, she begins to make a new life, and good things start to happen. Meeting Billl Steiner is one; and finding a junk-shop painting is another. lt ma be bad art but it's perfect for her new apartment - and somehow, it seems to want her as much as she wants it.



But escape was not as easy as fleeing to a new city, picking a new name, finding a new job, lucking out with a new man. Her husband, Norman, was a cop, with a cop's training, a cop's technology, a cop's bloodhound instincts. And even worse, Norman was - well, Norman. Rose knew she had been married to a savage brute. Now she realized she was being tracked down by a terrifying monster - but the only place she found to hide could be the most dangerous of all...



Rose-maddended and on the rampage, Norman Daniels becomes a force of relentless terror and savageness, a man almost mythic in his monstrosity. For Rosie to survive, for her to have a chance in her brave new world, she must enter her own myth - a world that lies beyond the surface of a work of art - and become a woman she never knew she could be: Rose Madder.