Private Lies - Softcover

Adler, Warren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380713071 ISBN 13: 9780380713073

Publisher: Avon Books, 1992

Synopsis

Married to other people and now much older, former lovers Ken Kramer and Carol Stein meet in New York after twenty years, rekindle their romance, and try to pair their respective spouses up with each other. Reprint.

About this title

Review:

"In Private Lies, Warren Adler does for infidelity and betrayal what his The War of the Roses did for incompatibility and greed. With Private Lies he has, with delicious tension, carved out the state of matrimony as his exclusive theater of war." -- Fred Mustard Stewart, author of Ellis Island and The Glitter and the Gold

"Private Lies is as juicy and wicked a tale of love, lust, and adultery as Fatal Attraction. Warren Adler has a very fine ear for dialogue and a remarkable ability to plumb the depths of human passion and obsession. This novel should set the institution of marriage back ten years." -- Nelson DeMille, author of The Gold Coast

"What a deliciously tangled web Warren Adler weaves in Private Lies! It's a story of love and deception among two couples with too much in common: secrets from the past . . . plans for the future . . . an African safari . . . a shocking, unexpected ending, all told with Warren Adler's special snap and crackle" -- Doris Mortman, author of Rightfully Mine

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

IT ALL BEGAN, as Ken perceived it, with a sudden fit of precognition, and he knew instantly that the mooring lines that stabilized his life were about to show the first signs of major slippage.

He had been observing this couple just coming out of the slanting April rain all aflutter and out of breath as they shook off drops from their raincoats before handing them over to the hatcheck girl at Pumpkins, the pricey restaurant on Second Avenue, Maggie’s choice, where the cooking was West Coast eclectic and the atmosphere luxury-liner Art Deco.

Ken, who was sitting facing the restaurant’s entrance, saw her first in profile as she patted her cheeks dry with a tissue. Couldn’t be, he decided at first, realizing suddenly that he had actually searched for her face in crowds for more than two decades.

Of course, he tried denying it, knowing it was the trigger to this precognition. No Way. This could not be Carol Stein. The process of aging cannot stand still. Yet he could not tear his gaze away. There was that same easy grace of the floating swan, the same question-mark dancer’s posture, the same high-cheekboned cat’s face, the same angled head, emphasizing the sharp line of tilted chin overhanging the long, thin, white neck.

Aside from the emotional power of this hard punch to the solar plexus of his psyche, his physical reactions, too, took him by surprise. His heart seemed to skip a beat, many beats. His back broke out into a cold sweat and his throat ran dry.

Then his wife, Maggie, waved and the tall man in the blue double-breasted wide pinstripe and elegant gold-and-blue-striped tie beside this replica of Carol Stein acknowledged the gesture with a movement of his own, tapping the shoulder of the woman who could not be Carol Stein.

He watched her move toward him with a ballerina’s dainty precision, her body gliding in step with some inner rhythm that made her long challis skirt seem driven by a gentle breeze over soft kid boots. The movement seemed to have a remembered signature, vibrating an old erotic chord within him.

Was this Carol Stein walking into his life after twenty-three years? He felt a blast of heat from that old furnace, firing up the passion and possession that had inflamed his youthful soul.

As she came closer, denial faltered and he felt trapped with all exits closed off. He would be an exhibit for her to observe and gloat over. Another tide of anxiety washed over him as he imagined the bloated remains of his former being lying on a cold slab awaiting Carol Stein’s coroner’s knife. Who could hide one’s failure from that kind of scrutiny? He felt ashamed, the bitter bile of his lost dreams on the verge of exposure. Suddenly there was no place to hide.

About this edition

• Publisher: Avon Books
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0380713071
• ISBN 13: 9780380713073
• Binding: Paperback