First published 1987
Kenneth Gibson spent fifty years as a bachelor, teaching poetry to undergraduates, his life orderly and uneventful. Then he married Rosemary, a fragile woman of thirty-two whose depression had left her pale and withdrawn. Under his care she recovered, grew lively and bright, and Gibson fell completely in love with his own wife. The trouble was whether she felt the same. When a car accident brings his sister Ethel out from the cold to sunny California, she refuses to leave. Ethel is practical, blunt, and certain about one thing: a man Gibson's age has no business being married to a woman Rosemary's age. She makes sure both of them know it. Their landlord Paul is younger, rich, and good-looking, and Ethel decides he is the obvious match for Rosemary. Gibson, worn down by doubt and grief, buys poison and puts it in an olive oil bottle, intending to remove himself from the equation. Then he boards a bus and leaves the bottle behind. Somewhere out there, an ordinary person is about to pick it up. Gibson has to find it before someone dies, and he has to do it without explaining why it matters.
Genres: domestic-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, morally-ambiguous, psychological, suspenseful, tension-filled
Tropes: race-against-time, toxic-relationship, unreliable-narrator
Setting: California
Period: 20th-century
160 pages · Paperback · Intl Polygonics Ltd
Content warnings: death, depression, suicidal-ideation