Her Last Affair

by John Searles

Genres: Literary Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

"A winner: tense and terrifying with a twist you’ll never see coming. You won’t soon forget these characters and the shocking ways their lives intersect." -- Laura Dave, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me

Every marriage has its secrets….

Skyla lives alone in the shadow of the defunct drive-in movie theater that she and her husband ran for nearly fifty years. Ever since Hollis’s death in a freak accident the year before, Skyla spends her nights ruminating about the regrets and deceptions in her long marriage. That is, until she rents a cottage on the property to a charming British man, Teddy Cornwell….

A thousand miles away, Linelle is about to turn fifty. Bored by her spouse and fired from her job when a questionable photo from her youth surfaces on social media, her only source of joy is an on-line affair with her very first love, a man she’s not seen in nearly thirty years, Teddy Cornwell…

While in New York City, Jeremy, a failed and bitter writer, accepts an assignment to review a new restaurant in Providence. Years ago, Providence was the site of his first great love and first great heartbreak—and maybe, just maybe, he’ll look her up when he’s back in town…

Part page-turning thriller, part homage to film noir, and dazzling in its insight into the often desperate desires of the human heart, Her Last Affair is a tense and atmospheric novel of love lost and found again. 

Release date: March 1, 2022

Publisher: Custom House

Print pages: 336

Sample

ON THE NIGHT HER MARRIAGE falls apart, Linelle Dufort spends nearly half an hour attempting to take a flattering picture of, to put it bluntly, her crotch. Two hours, if you consider the time devoted to simply contemplating the idea while lying in bed beside her husband, watching one of those shamelessly manipulative news series that poses as hard-hitting investigative journalism, though really, it's just an excuse to string viewers along, teasing the reveal of the killer's identity between Cialis and Boniva commercials.

            "It's obvious the wife did it," her husband, Marcus, keeps saying. "Look at her squinting. Look at her constant blinking. She's clearly a total psycho. Case closed. Boom!"

            Just that fall, he'd acquired the habit of punctuating sentences with the same final burst of a word.  At first, it made certain declarative things he said more declarative. But it's since devolved into him "booming" even after the most innocuous comments. "Gonna nuke that leftover pizza in the microwave. Boom!" . . . "This dude who came into the bank asked if I'm still in my thirties. Boom!" . . . "Got a request to show the 67 at the Tallahassee Car Show this weekend. Boom!" On and on these explosions go. If Linelle were some poor, defenseless country, she imagines he'd have reduced her to rubble by now. And anyway, try as she might, Linelle cannot focus on that show, since her gaze keeps gravitating to the alarm clock on the nightstand:

 

                10:53 p.m. . . . Speeding steadily closer to midnight.

            That's the magic hour when she promised to send a picture of her privates to a man from her past. This man, Teddy Cornwell, turned up Thanksgiving morning with a simple Facebook message: I've been thinking about you for years, Linelle. And with her full participation, things escalated online deep into December, culminating in a flurry of heated messages and a deal struck in a moment of unbridled lust the evening before:

Tomorrow at midnight, I'll show you mine if you show me yours.