Woman Run Mad

“Passions, the edge of madness, forbidden obsessions, runaway libidos and dangerous desires . . . a thinking man’s Fatal Attraction” (Chicago Sun-Times).

In A Woman Run Mad, John L’Heureux delivers a novel that is part comedy of manners and part psychosexual thriller. Blocked writer, accidental scholar, inattentive husband, all J.J. Quinn wants is peace, and he has gone to buy his wife an expensive handbag to accomplish it. As the bag in question walks out the door under the arm of a beautiful, aristocratic shoplifter, though, Quinn’s curiosity leads him deep into mystery and danger. The shoplifter is Sarah Slade, a Boston Brahmin attempting to ditch a past as bloody as Medea’s. Compared to Quinn’s hypercompetent, Euripides-scholar wife, Claire, the unhinged Sarah is an alluring breath of fresh air—but, of course, Quinn has no idea of the Pandora’s box he’s opened. Acclaimed by Newsweek as “witty and literate . . . Grand Guignol for grown-ups,” A Woman Run Mad is an unsettling, deeply satisfying novel.

A New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

“A superior suspense story . . . that might well have appealed to a writer like Patricia Highsmith, a drama of interlocking obsessions.” —The New York Times

“What a wonderfully hideous, gruesome, grueling horror-marathon of a book! A cross between a Henry James novel and the Texas chain saw massacre. I loved it.” —Carolyn See, author of Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America

“Normality—as our time understands the word—and monstrosity are L’Heureux’s poles, and he joins them with extraordinary dexterity . . . The ending is not to be revealed.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review