Nicci French

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<U+2019>s life<U+2014>and death<U+2014>Neve believes she can return to normal, shaken but intact. But she can<U+2019>t get out of her head the one tormenting question: what was she forgetting? An investigation into the slaying could provide the answer. It<U+2019>s brought Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Hitching, and Neve<U+2019>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<U+2014>and into more danger than she ever imagined. Because Hitching isn<U+2019>t the only one watching Neve. So is a determined killer who<U+2019>s about to make the next terrifying move in a deadly affair<U+2026>.