Private Lies - Hardcover

Adler, Warren

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688101208 ISBN 13: 9780688101206

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1991

Synopsis

Ken Kramer, a Manhattan advertising copywriter and his wife Sheila, appear to have a comfortable life and loving marriage. But when Ken is taken along on a business dinner and introduced to the wife of his wife's major client, we discover she is Ken's old flame -- in fact, the love of his life and the object of his sexual obsession as a young man. Baffled by her non-recognition, he learns that she has totally reinvented herself and snagged a rich husband who has no knowledge of her real early life. Unbeknownst to Ken, his own wife is carrying on a steamy affair with the client. When the love and sexual obsession between Ken and his old love bursts into flames again, the plot thickens as both couples embark on an African Safari with startling and tragic results.

About this title

About the Author:

Warren Adler is best known for The War of the Roses, his masterpiece fictionalization of a macabre divorce turned into the Golden Globe and BAFTA nominated dark comedy hit starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In addition to the success of the stage adaptation of his iconic novel on the perils of divorce, Adler has optioned and sold film rights to more than a dozen of his novels and short stories to Hollywood and major television networks. Random Hears (starring Harrison Ford and Kirsten Scott Thomas), The Sunset Gang (starring Jerry Stiller, Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, and Doris Roberts), Private Lies, Funny Boys, Madeline's Miracles, Trans-Siberian Express, and his Fiona Fitzgerald mystery series are only a few titles that have forever left Adler's mark on contemporary American authorship from page to stage to screen.

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: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0688101208
• ISBN 13: 9780688101206
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308