The Woman in the Fifth: A Novel
Douglas Kennedy
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1451602111
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the New York Times bestselling author of Leaving the World and The Moment comes the riveting story of a luckless college professor for whom Paris becomes a city of mortal danger.
A runaway bestseller in the UK and France that has been made into a film starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas, this suspenseful tour de force from the internationally renowned Douglas Kennedy is the quintessential sophisticated commercial novel.
Harry Ricks is a man who has lost everything. A romantic mistake at the small American college where he used to teach has cost him his job, his marriage, and the love of his only child. Hounded by scandal, he flees to Paris, where a series of accidental encounters lands him in a grubby room with a job as night watchman for a sinister operation. Just when he begins to think he has hit rock bottom, romance enters his life in the form of Margit—a cultivated, widowed Hungarian émigré who shares Harry’s profound loneliness but who keeps her distance, remaining guarded about her past. As Harry wrestles with Margit’s reticence, he begins to notice that all those who have recently done him wrong are meeting unfortunate ends—and it soon becomes apparent that he has stumbled into a nightmare from which there is no escape.
The Woman in the Fifth further establishes Douglas Kennedy as an author who “always has his brilliant finger on the entertaining parts of human sorrow, fury, and narrow escapes” (Lorrie Moore).
The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil
door directly in front of us. Size-wise, Adnan’s chambre was no bigger than the dump downstairs. But he’d tried to make it habitable. There was the same grim linoleum, but covered by a worn Turkish carpet. The floral wallpaper had been painted over in a neutral beige - a crude job, as hints of the previous leafy design still poked through the cheap emulsion. The bed was also narrow, but had been covered with a colored blanket. There was a cheap generic boom box and a tiny television. There was a
morally reprehensible …’ I said. ‘No one is being involuntarily harmed,’ he said. I paused, knowing I had to make a decision immediately. ‘I will never have to directly meet anyone?’ I asked. ‘You come at midnight, you go at six. You sit in this room. You don’t leave. You see the people who come here on the monitor. They don’t see you. It is all very elegant.’ ‘OK,’ I said, ‘we have a deal.’ ‘Good,’ Kamal said. After taking me again through all the various
doing drama - and had all these great plans for becoming a professional theater director. I was getting a doctorate in film studies and wanted nothing more than a nice secure tenured job at a nice secure university which wouldn’t be too taxing, would allow me to teach something I genuinely liked, and would also give me plenty of time to write “the novel” - check that: “the novels” - that I knew I was destined to write. From the moment I met her, Susan struck me as the ideal “life partner”. She
interview with the police. When I went out into the hallway, there were several technical guys still working on the toilet and Omar’s room, picking up every microfiber in the vicinity. Downstairs, a uniformed cop was still posted outside the door. ‘No one is allowed to leave the building,’ he said. ‘But Inspector Coutard asked to see me at the commissariat de police at two p.m.’ ‘Your name?’ he asked me. I gave it to him. He picked up his walkie-talkie and spoke into it. I heard
hands, his eyes had been gouged out, his throat cut.’ ‘Jesus Christ,’ I whispered. ‘There was nothing frenzied about such an attack. One must surmise that the murderer was very slow and deliberate in her maiming of her victim, in order to inflict maximum pain and terror on him. The coup de grace when his throat was cut must have been a desperate relief to him.’ ‘Did the police tell you how she had managed to bind and gag Bodo in the first place?’ ‘No, but like us, they too
