The truth is her survival tool, and she needs it as much as Adam needs her not to find it. Who is this man she’s entangled with? Is the violence she senses in him controllable? What about those women in his past, those women now no longer alive? Three accidental deaths? At what point does coincidence become something else-like menacing? Reluctantly, Alice turns detective. Two months from the time of their first meeting, Alice and Adam are married, but almost at once Alice feels uneasy, afraid. Gone in an eye-blink are the comfortable apartment and the satisfactory lover. Whatever the reality, she can’t stop what’s happening to her.

Not just good sex, or great sex, Alice thinks, but “obliterating sex.” She also thinks she might be going mad. He’s Adam Tallis, a celebrated mountaineer, a hero, having recently saved several lives during a notorious and doomed climbing expedition. When he asks her to go with him, she does. When she leaves her building later that day, he’s waiting for her. Crossing a street on her way to work one morning, she locks eyes with a tall, unbelievably handsome, stranger-and suddenly she’s lost. The direction of her life seems already settled, then, but it isn’t. She has a comfortable London apartment, a satisfactory lover, and an enviable job on the science side of industry. Alice Loudon is young, brainy, and beautiful. After two in England, French brings her third to the US-an elegant, chilling take on love, murder, and obsession.

Killing Me Softly by Nicci French