TUESDAY EXCERPTS: “THE LYING ROOM”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events: First Chapter/Intros, originally hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea and now hosted by I’d Rather Be at the Beach; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is The Lying Room, by Nicci French.

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Intro:  (The Assignation)

When Neve pulled up the blinds, the kitchen sprang into life like a theatre set, empty and waiting for the familiar show to begin.  She looked around:  it was all a bit threadbare, the skirting boards scuffed and that crack running down the wall.  She and Fletcher had been meaning to do something about it for years.

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Teaser:  She was about to leave—she had raised her hand to open the front door—when she stopped.  There was something odd about the flat.  What was it?  She thought and thought.  She walked back to the living room.  Suddenly she realized.  It wasn’t what was there.  It was what wasn’t there. (p.57).

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Synopsis:  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’s life—and death—Neve believes she can return to normal, shaken but intact. But she can’t get out of her head the one tormenting question: what was she forgetting?

An investigation into the slaying could provide the answer. It’s brought Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Hitching, and Neve’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—and into more danger than she ever imagined. Because Hitching isn’t the only one watching Neve. So is a determined killer who’s about to make the next terrifying move in a deadly affair….

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I am eager to immerse myself in this book.  What do you think?

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