A Murderous Affair?

A Murderous Affair? By Stacey Whatling
Rating: 4/5
Release Date: 28 June 2024

Set against the backdrop of London, Norfolk's Blakeney, and Suffolk's Southwold, Orford, and Aldeburgh, "A Murderous Affair?" is a scandalous and thrilling tale narrated from the perspective of a mistress. This humorous yet poignant narrative delves into her tumultuous relationship with a man she deeply loves—a man who also betrays her and his Tory MP wife over two decades spanning from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

The protagonist embarks on a turbulent and emotionally charged journey through the pages of "A Murderous Affair?". This compelling narrative is woven with a tapestry of absurd, humorous, and deeply moving anecdotes and scenes that capture the essence of her tumultuous life.

As she narrates her story, she finds herself navigating the ever-shifting social and sexual landscapes of London, Norfolk's Blakeney, and Suffolk's Southwold, Orford, and Aldeburgh. Caught in the throes of a clandestine affair with a married man, she grapples with the loneliness and moral complexities of her role as a mistress. Her reflections on love, intimacy, and betrayal are poignant and introspective, revealing a keen awareness of the human condition.

Throughout the years chronicled in the narrative, she confronts the harsh realities of aging and the profound impact of her choices on her own life and the lives of those around her. As she wrestles with feelings of hurt and abandonment, she contemplates the notion of revenge, only to realise that her perceived actions may have been anticipated or manipulated by her lover—or even his cunning Tory MP wife.

"A Murderous Affair?" is a masterful exploration of love's complexities, the corrosive effects of betrayal, and the intricate dynamics that define human relationships. Against the backdrop of evolving societal norms and personal revelations, the protagonist's journey unfolds with gripping authenticity, offering readers a compelling glimpse into the depths of human emotions and the consequences of desire.

Thank you so much to NetGalley, Troubadour, and the author, Stacey Whatling, for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest and fair review

Stacey Whatling writes like a modern day Nancy Mitford. This is a beautifully crafted novel. I was captivated from the very beginning as the narrator (not named until the final chapters) recalls the two decades she has spent in love with Gerald, as his mistress.
The writing is honest, evocative, brave, and explicit, and the story unfolds against a backdrop of middle class society and politics in England, at the end of the last century. Evelyn (for that is her name) ponders many things about her role in Gerald's life, and his role in her life. The tone constantly changes from a comedy of manners amongst the hail and hearty of Gerald's circle, to the utter despair of a woman in pursuit of love with a man who is legally bound to another woman, and his unfaithfulness to them both.
It is poignant, pithy, compelling and at times appalling as more secrets and lies are revealed. The work of a truly gifted author.

Thrilling read that kept me in suspense the entire book. Not my favorite thriller but I definitely enjoyed it!

This book is very well written. You will find yourself captivated from the start to end. It is a very compelling story that invokes a range of emotions in the reader while exploring a wide range of emotions in a relationship within the characters of the story. This author has wrote an inciteful immersive story of a destructive relationship and the roller coaster ride that entails.

Stacey Whatling’s “A Murderous Affair?” (note the question mark), with its depiction of a woman caught up in an affair with a Member of Parliament’s serially unfaithful husband, had me once again thinking, as I’ve been given to think any number of times in these depressingly nonliterary times of ours, how dispiriting it is that some not inconsiderable number of Americans, including our onetime and now would-be repeat president (almost proud he seems of being a nonreader), will never be able to appreciate the sort of truly fine prose in abundant display, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, in a novel as marvelously rendered as Whatling’s.
This, for instance, from our narrator, when she is cajoled into attending an art exhibit displaying some of the truly awful works of her lover’s latest interest, and she spots him cuddling with her across the room: “From my watching role from the distant side of the room, caught between one dreadful picture after another, murmuring hellos to people I knew, nodding at slight acquaintances, being introduced to others, I did have time to wonder, was my position from now on to be that of a kind of older Madame de Pompadour (albeit I was missing the relationships of my King Louis’s, pere and fils), now friend and confidante to the King, but no longer sharing the King’s bed, whilst he sought solace in the secrets of younger flesh, more flexible limbs, his aging desire set aflame by the energies of younger women?”
An incorrigible philanderer, in short, our narrator’s lover – like Bill Clinton, she says of her Gerald – with the brazenness to parade his latest liaison squarely in her face. Not without charm, though, she finds him (like Clinton), assuring the reader that he was “a very affectionate man and loyal, in his way.” Also, she notes, he looked after her for what seemed a lifetime, including sending a car round to bring her home after she had a series of moles removed.
Seeing him through decidedly less favorable eyes, though, is another woman at the art exhibit, who remarks of the attention she sees him bestowing on the narrator’s younger replacement, “talk about trying to put old wine in a new bottle.”
Which, with its cut-to-the-bone appraisal, takes aback even our narrator, who for all her citing of her lover’s good points is under no illusions about his propensity for egregiously lascivious behavior, be it with her or his wife or some other woman. Indeed, her recounting of the times and ways in which he has humiliated her over the course of their relationship became somewhat tedious after a time for me, though a couple of episodes stood out for their sheer over-the-topness.
There’s the moment at his tailor’s, for instance, where, while the two of them await his alterations, he suggests a “quick aperitif,” meaning, in his gentlemanly parlance, a coupling, which the two accomplish on the spot, sheltered from observation only by a curtain. But in a moment of abject mortification for our narrator, the curtain comes crashing down, leaving her wanting to “cover my face, dig a huge hole, crawl into it, die.” Or there’s the time when she goes looking for him and, in a scene reminiscent of the “Seinfeld” episode in which George Costanza ends up handcuffed to a bed by his seductress, she finds that he too has ended up in similar straits, and, more embarrassing still for him, discovered in the process that the woman he’d thought he’d been with “was a bloke!”
Enough they are, such episodes, with their near farcicality, to almost make a reader laugh or cry out of sympathy with him, though there’s little amusing or sympathetic overall about the way he treats and discards women. A particularly poignant moment, for instance, comes when one of his discarded women, behaving better under the circumstances than our narrator says she could have managed, is able to maintain her composure when she goes unnoticed by him as the two encounter each other at a rail station.
Reminiscent such moments were for me of the debasement experienced by female characters in other such novels I’ve read, including, with its depiction of a woman smitten with a man more like his gangster-like father than she’d like to believe, Molly Dektar’s “The Absolutes,” or, with its depiction of a woman so fascinated by a man accused of murder that she begins attending his trial each day, Muriel Davidson’s “The Thursday Woman.” So debased, indeed, did the women in those novels allow themselves to become as to have had me wondering in a review I wrote of “The Absolutes” if even a female reader totally besotted with some man might not have her patience tested by Dektar’s narrator only to have been assured by a female reader of my review that she could absolutely relate to the narrator's degree of obsession in “The Absolutes” – as, presumably, she could to Whatley’s narrator’s degree of obsession with Gerald.
A moment of reckoning, however, is coming for the “old roue,” as our narrator is given to call Gerald, though for all that it’s signaled from the novel’s very first page, the actual moment when it came wasn’t as dramatically satisfying as I’d been expecting, mostly for how, with the ambiguity with which it is presented, there’s some question of just how consciously or not the act against Gerald is perpetrated – or, indeed, if it was consciously perpetrated at all (hence the question mark of the title ).
All in all, though, a considerable achievement, Whatling’s novel, made all the more impressive for how, we’re told in an afterward, she suffered a brain injury in 2020 which made the writing of the novel a formidable climb – a climb which, particularly with the exemplary writing, I don’t think it would be immoderate to characterize as the literary equivalent of Hillary’s assault on Everest.