MURDER YOUR DARLINGS

A historical novelist falls for a literary superstar whose charisma and lusty good looks hide a dark secret.

Writing was Sam Vetiver’s first love and the only thing she ever wanted to do. But as she nears 50—and an editor’s deadline for a novel she’s unable to complete—she tells herself she would give up everything for the right man. Then Sam gets an unexpected fan letter from bestselling novelist William Corwyn, who asks to meet her at a Boston book talk, then invites her to dinner. Soon, a “dangerous distraction” that intensifies Sam’s writer’s block evolves into a steamy love affair with a man eager to help her complete her book. But nothing, including her lover’s generosity, is quite what it seems. Death follows William, as do stalkers. An all-female writer’s support group he runs, called the Darlings, is actually a memorial to a fiancée who died by suicide while they were in graduate school, and a female stalker called the Rabbit has an MFA program connection to William and his late fiancée. In a spicy romantic suspense novel that moves among the perspectives of three characters—Sam, William, and the Rabbit—Blum follows Sam as she loses herself in a maze of desire littered with the dreams and bodies of other women writers. To escape, she must form unlikely alliances that bring her back to a self and path she lost. Smart and darkly funny, Blum’s novel offers a biting commentary on romance, revenge, and the ways writers can “get inside us…and change us.”

A smart, sexy thriller that disturbs as it satisfies.