George Foss is a forty-year-old employee of a Boston literary magazine. He has passed the age when he thinks he might really fall in love, or take the world by storm, or have anything truly surprising happen to him. He has spent most evenings at a local pub with an on-again-off-again friend and lover, talking about the Red Sox and the minutiae of everyday life and obsessing about a love he lost in college. Until she reappears one day, twenty years later.
George has both dreamed of and dreaded seeing Liana Dector again. Liana was not simply an ex-girlfriend who had broken his heart. She was, as far as he knew, a woman who had skipped town under suspicion of murder, a woman whose transgressions were more in line with Greek tragedy than youthful indiscretion. Now Liana is in trouble. It has something to do with threatening men and missing money. And she needs his help. George could never resist her before-and that hasn't changed. Soon his quiet life is gone and he is pulled into a whirlpool of lies and murder that he will be very lucky to survive.
Reminiscent of the 1980's film,Body Heat, that made stars of Kathleen Turner and William Hurt, this romantic noir is full of malicious foreboding and subtle surprises that readers will never see coming. And the ever-tightening coil of suspense that culminates in the final scenes is at once so satisfying-and alarming-that it would have made Hitchcock blush.
