Perfidia

The Story

InPerfidia,Judith Rossner brings her unparalleled talent for dramatically uncovering those disturbing emotions we keep hidden to an electrifying story of a mother and a daughter--and reveals the complex and intense undercurrents of hostility and competition that flow beneath every mother-daughter relationship. Maddy Stern wants more than anything to feel loved by her divorced mother, who lavishes attention on Maddy's half-brother and her lovers while alternately abusing and ignoring her daughter. Sexually voracious and dangerously self-absorbed, Anita Stern competes with the teenage Maddy over everything--achievements, looks, even men. With Maddy's affair with the seductive Geraldo, the threatened loss of control over the Santa Fe art gallery Anita has built up, and Maddy's planned departure for college, their home becomes a battleground that explodes into violence--and death. This is Judith Rossner's tenth novel and the first, sinceLooking for Mr. Goodbar,in which she has dealt with those forces in 'ordinary' people that are so dark as to lead them to murder. Smart, desperately funny and shockingly real,Perfidiais simply impossible to put down.