The Lying Room
A Novel
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- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
One little secret between a married woman, her lover, and a killer.
In this thrilling standalone from the internationally bestselling author of the Frieda Klein series, a married woman’s affair with her boss spirals into a dangerous game of chess with the police when she discovers he’s been murdered and she clears the crime scene of all evidence.
It should have been just a mid-life fling. A guilty indiscretion that Neve Connolly could have weathered. An escape from twenty years of routine marriage to her overworked husband, and from her increasingly distant children. But when Neve pays a morning-after visit to her lover, Saul, and finds him brutally murdered, their pied-à-terre still heady with her perfume, all the lies she has so painstakingly stitched together threaten to unravel.
After scrubbing clean every trace of her existence from Saul’s life—and death—Neve believes she can return to normal, shaken but intact. But she can’t get out of her head the one tormenting question: what was she forgetting?
An investigation into the slaying could provide the answer. It’s brought Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Hitching, and Neve’s worst fears, to her door. But with every new lie, every new misdirection to save herself, Neve descends further into the darkness of her betrayal—and into more danger than she ever imagined. Because Hitching isn’t the only one watching Neve. So is a determined killer who’s about to make the next terrifying move in a deadly affair….
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Family drama and office politics take center stage in this tense standalone from the pseudonymous French, the husband-and-wife writing team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (the Frieda Klein series). Neve Connolly's discreet affair with her married boss, Saul Stevenson, was meant to relieve her stress at being the family's primary breadwinner and main parent to three challenging children, while her illustrator husband, Fletcher, goes on endless job interviews. Then she finds Saul murdered in his London apartment. Fearing the affair will become public, destroying her marriage and devastating her emotionally fragile daughter, Mabel, she scrubs the apartment of every bit of her presence. But she forgets her signature piece of jewelry. When she returns for it, it's missing, as is the murder weapon that was lying next to the body. Neve's co-workers wonder what will happen to them, since Saul's company only recently acquired their firm, while she worries she'll be the primary suspect. French makes Neve a fully rounded character through her relationships with friends and colleagues, though Neve's family dynamics stoop to the melodramatic. Fans of domestic thrillers will be rewarded.
