Love Affair and Murder Mystery All Rolled into One
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Have you heard the expression, it’s ok to have spring fever, but don’t fall into bed? This is advice the book’s main character, Perdita, needs to hear and heed. Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t. Fortunately for the reader, a great tale ensues because of these failures.
Beyond having a woman about to take the plunge on an affair, this book also gives us a mystery to solve, the murder of a twenty-five-year-old man named Nando.
Of course, the two characters will connect, literally and figuratively, but before getting to that, let me talk about Perdita, a young wife and mom with whom I could identify.
As we first meet Perdita, she is in her late thirties. She is married to Theo and together they have a toddler son, Atticus. The book takes place over three years, from 2007 to 2010. In this time, Perdita becomes pregnant again. She considers an abortion because Theo is averse to “babysitting” his offspring and appalled at the notion of changing a diaper. Additionally, he doesn’t talk to her very much.
Perdita is a social worker, so she is often very clear in understanding her situation. She says many astute things about Theo and their relationship:
- “Sometimes life can be a little silly and obvious in its metaphors…I think of the cassette tape my husband played in his car the summer we met, Air’s Moon Safari, a French dream-pop album that is almost entirely instrumental. If only I had been paying attention, I could have understood Theo’s message: I have no words to give you, I can give you music, but not words.”
- “[It’s] hard to quantify these things, but my professional guess is that Theo experiences about ten to fifteen percent of the total empathy available to humans. So…there’s hope? I think [I] need to stop appealing to his feelings. They’re there for emergencies, apparently. But they’re never going to make him care about what [I] want.”
- “It must be confusing, being denied feelings as a child and then later being expected to care about other people’s feelings. His whole life he was told that stuff was weak and gay.”
Clearly, Theo is not a bad guy. He’s just a guy.
It is at this point – with a sleep deprived, pregnant, and lonely Perdita – that a younger man literally falls into her life. Of course, it’s Nando. He is a roofer working on the next-door neighbor’s house. When he falls off his ladder, Perdita comes to his rescue. Even in his broken and battered state, when the 911 operator tells her to keep talking to him until the ambulance arrives, the two commune easily.
In chapters that bounce back and forth between their meeting and his death, Perdita tells us the entire story of those years including the birth of her second child, Honor, which certainly ups the ante on her exhaustion and possibly adds postpartum depression to the mix.
Beyond learning all of Theo’s bad points and Nando’s good ones, we also learn that Perdita is a true crime aficionado, so you better believe she will be looking into Nando’s murder.
As she tells us: “In all the years I’ve studied true crime, trying to anticipate the ways I could get got, I never thought about it happening to anyone I cared about. Until now, lying in bed at 4:00 a.m. reading about Nando’s murder in The Union-Tribune. Someone I cared about, a man whose presence was like five different drugs lighting up my brain, was shot in the street yesterday morning while walking to his car.”
One more quote and then this review is complete. Here is the very first line of the book’s prologue: “On America’s Worst Murders Ever, my favorite true crime show, you always find out who did it in the end.”
As readers will see, this is a promise the author keeps.
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If you like my writing, I hope you will check out my new book, Chai on Life. It contains 36 slice-of-life stories ranging in topics from belly fat to Billy Joel. It is available wherever books are sold and on Amazon. There is even a companion journal for you to write the stories of your life.
Chai on Life is available in 3 formats: Hard Back, Kindle, and AudioBook.
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