The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel - Couverture rigide

“The book has pace to burn. It feels like a throwback to Ross MacDonald’s flawed but relentless work . . . glimmers with bright and original moments.” (USA Today)

“In The Girl with a Clock for a Heart a long-lost lover resurfaces, with chaos in her wake. A must read!” (Harper's Bazaar)

“[A] roller coaster thrill-fest of a ride, filled with deliciously wicked moments of mystery, murder, and mayhem, double-cross and deception. A cerebral noir thriller debut.” (New York Journal of Books)

“Swanson gives readers an adrenaline rush through all the hairpin turns.” (Publishers Weekly)

“The pace is fast . . . and the plot genuinely twisty . . . [It is] seemingly pre-measured for the movies . . . often to good effect; all in all, a quick, deft, promising first crime novel.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“The labyrinthine plot here has a grip of high-tensile steel.” (Financial Times (UK))

“What do you say when a woman who broke your heart years ago and is wanted for questioning in connection to a murder pops back into your life to ask a favor? If she’s as alluring as Liana Dector, you say, ‘Yes.’ And hope you survive . . . The Girl with a Clock for a Heart is a twisty, sexy, electric thrill ride.” (Dennis Lehane, New York Times bestselling author)

“An edge-of-your-seat psychological thriller that dares you to turn the next page . . . This novel burns faster and hotter than a lit fuse, and you’ll be feeling its heat long after the explosive ending.” (Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home)

“The parallel stories unwind relentlessly with audacious and spectacular twists . . . An intense mix of noir, pulp fiction, and fun . . . The most unsurprising aspect of this book? It’s already been optioned for a film.” (Boston Globe)

“Who are literature’s most lethal women? . . . Here’s a new contender: Liana Decter, who causes endless heartbreak and occasional death in Peter Swanson’s compulsively readable [The Girl with a Clock for a Heart] . . . should be a contender for crime fiction’s best first novel of 2014.” (Washington Post)

An atmospheric tale of romantic noir with shades of Hitchcock about a man who is swept into a vortex of irresistible passion and murder when an old love mysteriously reappears

George Foss, a forty-year-old employee of a Boston literary magazine, has passed the age when he thinks he might fall madly in love or take the world by storm, or have anything truly remarkable happen to him. He spends most of his evenings at his local tavern talking about the Red Sox and the minutiae of everyday life, and obsessing over a lost love from his college days who vanished twenty years earlier. Until she reappears.

George has both dreamed of and dreaded seeing Liana Decter again. She isn't just an ex-girlfriend or the first love George could never forget. She's also an enigma and quite possibly someone who was involved in a murder years ago, a woman whose transgressions are more in line with Greek tragedy than youthful indiscretion. But suddenly, she's back—and she needs his help. She says that some men are after her and that they believe she's stolen money from them. And now they will do whatever it takes to get it back.

George knows Liana is trouble. But he can't say no—he never could—and soon his quiet life is gone as he is pulled into a terrifying whirlpool of lies, betrayal, and murder from which there is no sure escape.

Bold and masterful, full of malevolent foreboding and subtle surprises, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart is an addictive, nonstop reading experience—an ever-tightening coil of suspense that will hold you in its grip right up to its electrifying end.