"Amelie and Janet are in love with the same man: Janet's husband. One knows it; the other doesn't. Or does she?
As bestselling novelist Amelie Ferrar knows, an affair with a married person is like a work of fiction—a kind of spy story with its own rules and customs, negotiations and compromises, and many private rituals. But like any spy story, there will inevitably be a betrayal: something will slip; someone else will find out; someone may even die.
As Amelie falls deeper into her obsession with the man she loves—and his wife—the line between the fiction she writes and the reality she lives begins to blur...and the twisted ending to this story is one that not even she could have seen coming."
"After fleeing to Paris to escape communist rule, Polish émigré and piano player Jerzy Wozzeck finds it nearly impossible to support his family on his low-paying bistro gigs. So when a friend offers a fat payoff for handling a string of deliveries, Jerzy quickly finds himself in the uneasy employ of an anonymous suit and his sensual assistant. With a couple of flawless jobs under his belt, Jerzy starts living the good life—until, on one such run, he stumbles across a corpse and realizes his benefactors will go to any lengths to protect their operations.
To ensure his loyalty, Jerzy’s patrons ply him with every possible temptation, from the purest drugs to the most willing women—and he begins selling his soul piece by piece to maintain his illusion of prosperity. But when rival crime lords and hit men enter the fray, Jerzy plots to escape his boss’s dirty dealings—only to discover he’s in too deep to get out alive."
"Nick Copeland has lost his mind only twice in his forty-eight years—once in college on a bad acid trip, and once at this very moment, as the mountain of bills he’s been hiding from his family finally topples. But Nick’s chance meeting with an old friend, Rob Johnson, pulls on the memory wires. Rob—who’s already lost his wife and job—seems resigned to a life of basic cable and Chinese takeout. Suddenly, the answer to their problems arrives: two airtight jars of high-grade heroin they’d buried under the football field of their old college campus.
Returning to the scene of the crime-that-never-happened seems like a cinch—that is, until Nick takes a trip down Memory Lane and a sharp right turn on Law Enforcement Drive. This is not the beads-and-bellbottoms of their youths, but maybe the Stones were right, anyway: you can’t always get what you want.
Tarintino meets Mamet in this action-packed trip from the prolific literary novelist J.P. Smith."
"What does grief taste like? What does it weigh? How does it quietly curve around your heart, begging long-kept secrets to become unburied?
When history professor Jill Bowman learns of her husband’s gruesome murder in a seedy motel room, she knows he had no business being there—not serious, sincere Peter, the man she’d known in the most intimate ways a person can be known.
Enveloped in grief, Jill struggles to piece together what could have happened that night and slowly uncovers Peter’s secrets. But her search reveals dark parts of herself as well…secrets she’d never known she was keeping. The self-discovery forces her to reexamine her relationships with her family, her students, her mentally ill daughter, and the detective handling Peter’s case—to whom she finds herself inexorably drawn.
At once a shadowy, erotically charged thriller and a heartbreaking portrait of grief, Breathless explores the subtle and precious intricacies of a life upended by sudden death."
"Divorced American academic David Reid teaches English by day and spends his free time writing mystery novels that nobody reads. In London he meets his new editor, Kate. Blonde and beautiful, she is also mysterious and aloof—and soon captivates David.
The feeling seems mutual and the two are soon wed, but Kate quickly spirals into a deep sadness. In less than two years, she leaves David and heads to New York City. Just as the shock of her absence sets in, David receives a call announcing Kate’s instant death under a subway train.
Was Kate trying to return to David when she was killed? Was it an accident? A suicide? A murder? The more David learns, the less he wants to know—especially when he discovers Kate had been having an affair with French novelist Marc Rougemont, whose work she was allegedly translating.
As David searches for the truth about his wife, he becomes fixated on two paintings of women by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, for whom David and Kate shared a passion that bordered on obsession. Was his wife as unknowable as the subjects of these cryptic, beautifully rendered portraits?"
"For years, Alex Ostroff churns out unsuccessful, unpublished manuscripts. His rejection is complete when he’s rebuffed by London’s literary set and unceremoniously thrown out of a party by the host. His exasperated literary agent encourages Alex to write what he knows, but the writer is loathe to reveal anything about himself. Alex follows the advice, however, mining his childhood for material.
The son of Russian expatriates, Alex certainly has a compelling past. His parents, glamorous figures living in France under assumed names, worked with a shadowy Frenchman named Felix Dumont in a mysterious import-export business that involved fraud, forgery, blackmail, and murder. Drawing from these memories, Alex’s new novel, Troika, finally lands the struggling author some acclaim.
As his writing career—and the media’s fascination with him—gathers steam, Alex questions much of what his parents have told him. And when he unexpectedly encounters Dumont in London, he learns the dark truth lurking behind the fictions of his life."
"When Adam Füst’s wife, Honnie, suddenly vanishes, the couple’s friends assume she was just unhappy and skipped town. Wracked with worry and confusion, Adam knows there’s more to the story.
When the realization hits that he doesn’t know his wife well enough to find her, he enlists the help of a brilliant but amoral cop to comb the streets of Paris for her. The deeper their investigation goes, the more Adam learns about Honnie’s past—and the secrets she kept from him. Pimps, prostitution, murder…
In this modern-day version of the Orpheus myth, Adam descends into Paris’s underworld to find the woman he loves. The city’s sex shops, seedy night clubs, and the people who inhabit them simultaneously repel Adam and draw him ever deeper, giving him a painfully clear look into Honnie’s past—and his own soul.
Adam’s grief eventually gives way to his obsession with finding her, driving his sanity to the breaking point. Even if he should find Honnie, has he already lost her forever?"
