The Lonely Hunter [signed jhc] by John Grant

What happened was that there was a murder. The victim was a cheating husband and the murderer was the wife he was cheating . . .

When wannabe literary writer Emil Martenson travels from a decaying America to France on commission to interview ageing, addiction-raddled science fiction writer Danny Lerner for an entertainment website, he doesn't know that he's about to be plunged into the heart of a mystery story – not just the mystery of why a man died but also the mystery of Emil's own life, of his relationship to the reality around him, and of the woman with whom he chooses to share what becomes, as written lives are, a somewhat conditional existence. Is he merely a pawn, being shuffled around the board of someone else's game, or is he himself the player?