About This Book
Kate Burke's marriage looks perfectly ordinary from the outside — soccer mom, devoted wife, quiet suburban life. Behind closed doors, it runs on a very different set of rules. When Kate and her husband strike an unconventional arrangement to keep their relationship alive, it works, until a mysterious young widow moves in nearby and starts pulling at threads neither of them knew were loose. Lisa Kusel's novel builds its tension not from explosions but from small, unsettling shifts — the kind that make you question what you thought you knew about the people closest to you.
What makes this book worth settling into is how Kusel plays both sides of desire: the erotic and the anxious, often in the same scene. The prose is intimate and sharp, and the structure keeps tightening the screws on a situation that should be under control but clearly isn't. Kusel writes suburban domesticity with a knowing edge, and her protagonist's double life — outwardly conventional, privately consumed by fantasy and observation — gives the novel a layered quality that goes well beyond the thriller packaging. It's the kind of book that makes you read faster the more uncomfortable it gets.