Already optioned for film, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart is Peter Swanson’s electrifying tale of romantic noir, with shades of Hitchcock and reminiscent of the classic movie Body Heat. It is the story of a man swept into a vortex of irresistible passion and murder when an old love mysteriously reappears.
On an ordinary Friday evening at his favorite Boston tavern, George Foss’s comfortable, predictable life is shattered when a beautiful woman sits down at the bar, a woman who vanished without a trace twenty years ago.
Liana Dector isn’t just an ex-girlfriend, the first love George couldn’t quite forget. She’s also a dangerous enigma and quite possibly a cold-blooded killer wanted by the police. Suddenly, she’s back—and she needs George’s help. Ruthless men believe she stole some money . . . and they will do whatever it takes to get it back.
George knows Liana is trouble. But he can’t say no—he never could—so he makes a choice that will plunge him into a terrifying whirlpool of lies, secrets, betrayal, and murder from which there is no sure escape.
Bold and masterful, full of malicious foreboding and subtle surprises, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart is an addictive, nonstop thriller—an ever-tightening coil of suspense that grips you right up to its electrifying end.
George Foss has passed the age when he thinks he might fall madly in love or have anything truly remarkable happen to him. He spends evenings at his local tavern talking about the Red Sox 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's an enigma and quite possibly someone who was involved in a murder years ago. But she's back—and needs his help. She says that some men are after her and that they believe she's stolen their money. And now they will do whatever it takes to get it back.
George can't say no—he never could—and soon his life is gone as he is pulled into a terrifying whirlpool of lies and betrayal, from which there is no sure escape.
"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."
