The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel

Product Description
Pub Date: 2014-02-04 Pages: 304 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins 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 isnt just an ex-girlfriend or the first love George could never forget. Shes also an enigma and quite possibly someone who was involve...
Review
“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)\n“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)\n“[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)\n“Swanson gives readers an adrenaline rush through all the hairpin turns.” (Publishers Weekly)\n“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)\n“The labyrinthine plot here has a grip of high-tensile steel.” (Financial Times (UK))\n“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)\n“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)\n“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)\n“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)
About the Author
Peter Swanson has degrees in creative writing, education, and literature from Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College. His stories and poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Mysterical-E, Vocabula Review, and Yankee Magazine. He lives with his wife in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is at work on his second novel.