Something Like a Love Affair

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Summary: Something Like A Love Affair
Review: Judith Lassiter has a problem. She is unhappy in her life. At the start of this novel she deals with it the nice way: she mails love-letters to herself and plants them on the breakfast-table beside her when they arrive, hoping her husband, Victor, will ask about what sort of mail she's getting. It seems she somehow wants to live out a romantic fantasy, and yet also use it to create ripples in her drab, unfulfilling realworld environment. But Victor never seems to care enough to ask about her private mail. Victor, in fact, is under investigation at work for some shady business practices that start with collusion in a blackmail scheme (to force a nature-lover to back off from protecting property that Victor's architectural firm wishes to develop).

Stuck in a rut, Judith begins a passionate, breathtaking extramarital affair with a fellow much her junior--Billy, who has the odd job of re-teaching veteran drivers how to brush up their eroded road-skills. A strange form of employment, but that's not all that's strange about Billy; near as Judith can come to figure it, Billy is either living with his mother or perhaps is hiding another lover at home. Plus, he has a rough past, once hiring a group of toughs to rough up his own father.

As her husband becomes more guarded in his comments about how much trouble he could be in at work, and as all her close friends seem to be suggesting she actually stay in bad marriage, Judith and Billy try to work out a possible future. But there are complications. Judith seems to be developing some kind of fractured personality, and when someone tries to blackmail her using an embarrassing portion of her past against her, Judith begins to contemplate hiring a hitman to clean up her problems before she can run off with Billy.

Several short sections of the novel break in on the main narrative to show just little hints at how it is all going to turn out: there will be at least one corpse lying in some underbrush. The murder victim's identity is of course revealed at the finale, where we learn how all Judith's trials and tribulations, including her need for Billy, have led.