Little Bits of Badness

Rebecca meets Gone Girl
Novelist Heather Wyatt used to be successful, but her career isn't going so well these days. She's at a writer's conference to get drunk, er, network. Over cocktails, she meets another writer. He's blond and broad and beautiful, with a private jet and an honest-to-God British title.

"Come away with me, Heather," he says, the second day she knows him.

Crazy, right? But she wants to say yes.

She probably shouldn't. This rich and handsome man is Jacob Lloyd. She doesn't recognize him right away, but then she remembers. It was all over the news, five years ago. He was wrongly imprisoned for murder, because he gave a false confession. It turned out his then-girlfriend had actually killed her parents, not him. The girlfriend felt so guilty, she killed herself and divulged the truth in her suicide note.

So, Jacob has a dark past, but he's innocent.

Besides, maybe it's romantic for a man to have rescued the woman he loved by going to prison for her crime. Maybe it makes him more alluring in some way. And anyway, with her writing career on the skids, Heather's got nothing else going for her.

So, Heather lets Jacob whisk her off to Rome, where they have leisurely meals and sleep late in each other's arms. Everything is idyllic and charming. Until she finds a set of letters written by Jacob's dead girlfriend.

And the more Heather reads, the more she begins to think that when Jacob confessed to stabbing that couple to death in their dining room, he was telling the truth.

This domestic thriller does not fade to black, nor does it censor its characters' language. Reader discretion advised.