Catharsis for a Victim of Incest, Rape : Fiction: The first-time Laguna Niguel author’s smash novel, ‘Mitigating Circumstances,’ has helped her deal with some of the most painful times of her life.

Nancy Taylor Rosenberg led a visitor through her opulent home, apologizing for a nonexistent mess.

Over there, she explained as she pointed to a long countertop in her House Beautiful kitchen, was where she’d placed her Smith-Corona each morning and pounded out “Mitigating Circumstances,” a Ventura County-set police thriller that recently hit bookstores amid a flurry of publicity.

Since writing the book, well, housework hasn’t been foremost on her mind.

After a fierce bidding war, New American Library/Dutton won the publication rights to the book plus her next one; Rosenberg pocketed nearly $800,000; and TriStar added another $125,000 to option the book for big-screen treatment, which Jonathan Demme of “Silence of the Lambs” is scheduled to direct. Under the TriStar agreement, Rosenberg will receive an additional $10,000 for every week the book is on the bestseller list.

Not bad for a first-time author.

That’s especially true when one considers that a year ago, the onetime Ventura County investigative probation officer’s only writing credits were for the sentencing recommendations she made to judges for convicted murderers, rapists and child molesters.

“Even when I was getting rejection letters from agents--they were mimeographed ones and you know they didn’t even read it--I just knew the book was good,” said Rosenberg, whose resemblance to her book’s main character extends far beyond her long, red hair and trim figure.

“Do you know that I actually had agents reject me as a client when I’d already been paid by Dutton and TriStar and been in Publisher’s Weekly?”

From the look of things, it’s a mistake book agents are unlikely to repeat. In addition to the inside knowledge Rosenberg brought to her novel, from her work as a Texas police officer and later in Ventura County, a major factor in the book’s success probably was its woman-driven-to-extremes theme.

For evidence of the topic’s popularity, one need only look to the box-office receipts for such films as “Thelma and Louise” or flip on the television and see docudramas such as “The Betty Broderick Story” and “The Amy Fisher Story.”

“That’s what’s selling in Hollywood now,” said Steve Delsohn, a book agent who heads the West Coast office of a New York-based literary group.

“I must have gotten 10 phone calls from agents looking for books about ‘women in jeopardy,’ which is the new buzz phrase. The whole trend is kind of grotesque.”

Not, apparently, to Demme. Although the Oscar-winning director could not be reached, Valerie Thomas, Demme’s director of development, said there were several aspects to Rosenberg’s novel that he found attractive.

“Jonathan has always been a big fan of the positive female character as the center of a story,” Thomas said. “Not only is it an interesting story, but it’s also commercially viable.”

“Mitigating Circumstances” tells the story of Lily Forrester, a savvy Ventura County assistant district attorney who is followed from her workplace at the County Government Center to her home, where she is brutally attacked and her 13-year-old daughter is raped.

Along with the shock and trauma of the graphically conveyed ordeal, the assault sets off memories of incest that Lily experienced as a child at the hands of her grandfather.

After Lily discovers the rapist’s mug shot amid papers in her briefcase, she takes matters into her own hands.

Without giving away too much of the plot, suffice to say that Lily does not issue her attacker a parking ticket. She then is left to struggle with guilt for what she has done, as well as the terror of being caught--both of which are exacerbated when a crack detective is put on the case.

Not surprisingly, not every opinion of Lily Forrester is that she is “a woman aggressive enough to take action, yet human enough to grapple with the emotional consequences when she does,” as put forth by Dutton’s publicity department. The question of vigilante justice also arises.

“Readers--and this first novel will have many--may note to their discomfort that, ultimately, Lily really isn’t much more than Charles Bronson in a designer dress,” wrote the respected Kirkus Reviews.

Said Publisher’s Weekly: “It’s possible to have retrospective qualms about the many plot convolutions, which seem designed only to give a beautiful redhead an airtight reason to kill an unknown Hispanic.”

Does such criticism trouble Rosenberg? Hardly.

“I in no way think it’s right,” Rosenberg said of the type of justice her character imposes on her attacker. “But I know that people feel like doing it. She reached the threshold of intolerance.

“There are a lot of women who have been severely abused, raped and beaten. These women are injured. I’ve handled these cases, where they are cut and slashed and horrid things are done to them. I don’t think people reading this book are going to go get a shotgun out of the garage. But maybe they’ll release a lot of anger.”

Which is exactly what happened to Rosenberg when she pulled out a typewriter and began pouring out on paper what she had experienced years before.

Rosenberg, 47, born and raised in Dallas, began a five-year career as a photographic model when she was 14. Although successful, she hated it and “felt like a dolly.” At 16 she went to a private girls school in Mississippi and later attended a local college, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English.

She was also raped there.

“I went to a party I probably shouldn’t have gone to,” she said. “I didn’t go to the police and I didn’t tell my parents. Part of the reason was because of the way things were then--the attitude that ‘you must have asked for it.’ But I also think that once you are sexually abused, you think, ‘This is just the way life is.’ ”

Like her character, Rosenberg said she also became an incest victim as a young child at the hands of her grandfather. Each year, Rosenberg’s parents, whom she describes as working-class people who couldn’t afford air-conditioning during the sweltering Dallas summers, would send her and her sister to visit their wealthy grandparents in Houston.

“They had this ranch they bought just to take the little girls,” Rosenberg recalled, sipping ice water, seated on the sofa of her home overlooking the ocean. “They bought us ponies, cowboy hats, and that’s where it all began.”

The scenes of incest in “Mitigating Circumstances” are vivid and horrifying. They also are real, she said. But they remained buried during her postgraduate years, when she studied criminology, and later, when she worked with the Dallas Police Department and the New Mexico State Police.

After she joined the Ventura Police Department in 1978 and took a job with Ventura County Court Services in 1982, memories began to stir.

As an investigative probation officer, Rosenberg’s job was to interview convicts in the Ventura County Jail, as well as victims and their families when possible. She then wrote sentencing recommendations to judges.

“I never even thought about it, but then, when I was working with sex victims, I started crying,” she said. “I started getting so emotionally distraught in Ventura County. I just kept having flashbacks and I knew something wasn’t right.”

When she began writing her book, she said, the scenes “wrote themselves.”

“In a way, I think I brought my grandfather back to life so I could punish him in fiction and kind of avenge what happened,” she said.

Rosenberg left Ventura County five years ago and moved with her second husband, a real estate investor, and the couple’s combined five children to Laguna Niguel. After their youngest moved away last year, Rosenberg decided to try her hand at writing.

She applied to a writing seminar through UCLA Extension, thought someone had made a “horrid mistake” when she was accepted to it--and promptly saw her manuscript cut to ribbons by her classmates.

“I sat next to a man who was the past president of Columbia Pictures, and there were some very talented people in the class. And they ate me alive,” she said.

“They didn’t think I could write. They said I should go get a day job.”

She credits course instructor Leonardo Bercovici with giving her the four words of encouragement she needed to continue: “She has a voice.”

“There was a quality of authenticity of her work--she had been a policewoman--that made her work quite attractive,” Bercovici said, acknowledging that criticism in the class could be “quite severe.”

“But she certainly responded to it with rewritten material,” he added. “Nancy is a tireless rewriter, which goes a long way. This is someone who literally works 10 and 15 hours a day. Her ability to work is on the phenomenal side.”

Which is good news, especially since Rosenberg already has signed a new contract for four more books and now considers herself a full-time writer.

“Want to see what I’m spending some of my Dutton money on?” she asked as she walked upstairs, stepping carefully over the oak paneling on the floor.

Inside a large room with French windows were two carpenters, putting the finishing touches on the room’s wall-to-wall built-in bookcases.

“I’ve always wanted them,” she said.