My Summer Darlings - Hardcover

Cobb, May

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593101162 ISBN 13: 9780593101162

Verlag: Berkley, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

As seen on the TODAY show as “a perfect beach read.”

Three lifelong friends plus a dangerous, sexy new stranger in town add up to a scorching summer of manipulation, obsession, and murder, from the acclaimed author of The Hunting Wives.

                 A woman in the forest thinks she’s going to die.
                          I know he’s coming back for me.
 
Jen Hansen, Kittie Spears, and Cynthia Nichols have been friends since childhood. They are now approaching forty and their lives have changed, but their insular East Texas town has not. They stay sane by drinking wine in the afternoons, dishing about other women in the neighborhood, and bonding over the heartache of their own encroaching middle age and raising ungrateful teens.
 
Then Will Harding comes to town, moving into one of the neighborhood’s grandest homes. Mysterious and charming, he seems like the answer to each woman’s prayers. He’s a source of fascination for Jen, Kittie, and Cynthia, but none of them are ready for the way Will disrupts their lives.
 
As Will grows closer with each of the women, their fascination twists into obsession, threatening their friendships and their families. When he abruptly pulls away, each woman scrambles to discover the source of his affection. But what they’ll uncover is far more sinister and deadly than any of them could have ever imagined.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

May Cobb earned her MA in literature from San Francisco State University, and her essays and interviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Rumpus, Edible Austin, and Austin Monthly. Her previous novel is The Hunting Wives. A Texas native, she lives in Austin with her family.
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.

 

Six Weeks Earlier

 

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

 

Jen

 

I heard him before I saw him. He arrived in the middle of a hot, balmy morning, a week ago today, the low rumble of his 1967 Chevy pickup snaking around the block as I was bent over, twisting the rusty nozzle on the garden hose. Tepid water sputtered out of the warm rubber and oozed around my flip-flop-clad feet as he slowed his truck and rounded the bend in front of my house. Did he wink at me? I'm still not sure, but a small grin crept across his face and he gave me the quickest of nods.

 

Even in this brief exchange, I could feel the fever of attraction. My neck flushed and my hand shot up of its own accord, waving maniacally at him.

 

I could tell he was dead handsome through the windshield, the glaring morning sunlight catching blond streaks in his short sandy hair. His toned lean arm slung across the blue steering wheel. His honey-kissed skin and that perfect mouth I could already imagine pressing my lips to.

 

After the truck coasted up the hill and out of sight, I doused the row of tropical plants I'd recently planted-pumpkin-colored cannas, a stand of banana trees, and a bed of waxy elephant's ears-my pulse thrumming from this brush with him.

 

This had been the first task I'd thrown myself into upon moving back to Cedartown eight months ago: ripping out the generic, predictably cheesy flower beds tended to by the landscapers-geraniums and petunias-in an effort to make the yard as lush and verdant as possible.

 

And as opposite as possible from the yard of my failed marriage: the arid xeriscaped rock lawn with jagged succulents that rimmed our modern two-story farmhouse just south of downtown in Austin. Fucking Felix with his fucking minimalism.

 

I've likewise tried to eradicate all signs of Felix from inside the house. Or as much as my son, Kasey, can bear. I left behind all of Felix's hard-edged furniture but kept his Danish sideboard and matching table made of teak. Because those were two pieces of his I genuinely liked, and also, because I knew he adored those more than anything else. And after what he had done to me, I had to jab back at his heart a little. Make him bleed a bit.

 

In the house, on the mantel, there's a lone picture of Felix holding two-year-old Kasey. Snapped thirteen years ago. Long before the string of affairs. At least that's what I tell myself-I don't know what to really believe anymore-and long before Felix's descent into his full-blown midlife crisis. In the photo, a rough beard frames his strong jaw and he's flashing a bright smile. A father beaming at his dumpling-faced toddler. Kasey is bundled in a red parka, his golden locks springing from beneath a hand-knitted toboggan.

 

When I unpacked the photo from the tissue paper, my intention was to put it on Kasey's dresser, but it's always been on our mantel and Kasey lifted it from me and parked it there. I wasn't in a position to argue with him-he's been snippy with me ever since the divorce, as if his father's philandering was somehow my fault-so I have to pass by Felix every time I walk through the living room. But I've already managed to autoblock him each time I glimpse it, focusing instead on Kasey's crimped face, captured midgiggle.

 

At least my bedroom is one hundred percent Felix-free. No more stacks of serious, severe books of music criticism and design magazines, arranged to disguise poorly hidden issues of Playboy.

 

Now my weathered wooden nightstand holds my ever-growing collection of self-help books: Pema Chšdršn's When Things Fall Apart; Melody Beattie's Codependent No More; a few of BrenŽ Brown's books, which I have yet to crack; and various yoga/meditation books.

 

I've recently taken to reading a book of mantras just before I doze off at night:

 

I am already complete, whole, and loved.

 

The universe provides.

 

I attract abundance.

 

Love surrounds us in each moment of every day.

 

My thoughts become my reality; think positive ones.

 

And so forth. I feel slightly ridiculous chanting these out loud to myself while I'm out in the yard gardening; I realize that most people would cringe if they heard me, but I swear they're already starting to help just a tiny bit.

 

The yard work is helping, too. And not just with my sanity. Now that my parents don't have to pay for the landscaping service, they apply the savings to the monthly stipend they give me to keep me and Kasey afloat. Between that and living in their rental (my childhood home) rent-free, we just about manage to scrape by each month. Of course, there's alimony and child support, but Felix's lawyer friend managed to ensure the settlement was as favorable to Felix as possible. And seeing how I haven't worked since Kasey was born, it's not as though I have any income of my own to contribute to things, which is something I need to figure out.

 

So each morning, I work for an hour or so in the yard, tearing out weeds, plunging my hands into the ruddy clay earth, and sizing up the jade-colored carpet of Saint Augustine grass to see where I might lay more beds for tropicals and possibly even some herbs.

 

It's a nice-sized lot shaded by a stand of stately pines that thud their cones to the ground in winter. And it's calming for me to be out there in the early hours, listening to the backdrop sounds of my childhood: the sizzling hiss of cicadas, the drilling of woodpeckers, the gurgling of the neighborhood creek that winds along the back side of our property.

 

Our small town in northeast Texas may not have the hipness and glossiness of Austin, but it's serene and it's home.

 

Home. I'm home again. That's another mantra (but one that I made up) that keeps running through my mind while I'm out there tending to the property, as if to solidify the fact that this is my new home and as if to make that fact less surreal.

 

 

The morning that Blond Man drove past, however, I cut my work short. As soon as I finished watering the plants, I turned off the faucet and dropped the hose to the ground without even bothering to coil it back around its stand, the tip of it chinking against the concrete drive.

 

I padded inside and pulled my sweaty hair into a quick ponytail before grabbing my keys and hopping into my white Honda Accord.

 

I set off in the same direction as Blond Man, taking the long way around my street, Azalea Circle. I live on the far end, near the edge of the forest, and normally I turn left out of the drive and head straight out of the neighborhood. There's never a reason to turn right and circle around the back, past the row of houses that grows more opulent as the street climbs the gentle-sloping hill.

 

I used to bike this route as a kid and all the homes and families who lived there are imprinted on my mind like photos in an album: the Carters' colonial mansion with its chalk-white columns; the Dickensons' sprawling 1970s ranch with its endless wings; the Wards' elegant contemporary-all glass and blond wood, as if it were built out of the earth itself.

 

I eased up the incline and I saw his vintage blue truck parked at the curb in front of Dr. Ellingsworth's old estate, the grandest home in all of Eden Place, the pseudoparadisiacal-sounding name of our neighborhood. A shock of adrenaline jolted my chest and I yanked down my sunglasses to help shield my face as I neared the house.

 

When I was just a little girl, Dr. Ellingsworth was already a widower living in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593101162
• ISBN 13: 9780593101162
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BERKLEY; https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY; ; Unit 2 Limavady Business Park; Limavady; County Londonderry; BT49 0HR; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland