After being dumped by the killer, the actress’s best friend discovers she is pregnant. By the time she learns that the father of the child she is carrying is a psychopathic murderer, it’s too late to consider an abortion. She hatches a plan to conceal her condition for the remainder of her term and give birth at home, in secret. She enlists the help of a close male friend, together with whom she withdraws to a rural hideout. The plan is to abandon the newborn in a safe place, its parents’ identity remaining forever unknown and untraceable. But things go awry, and the baby dies two days after he is born. By this time the young man, besieged by fears and regrets about his collusion, has begged the narrator to come to the hideout and try to persuade their friend, now seriously depressed and behaving irrationally, to see a doctor. Thus the narrator is a witness to the baby’s death. To this day, she tells us, she has never been sure whether he died of crib death or some other natural cause or was in fact smothered by his emotionally troubled mother. But when, in order to protect her friend and the young man (and, by extension, herself) from what would likely be a criminal investigation—one that could quite possibly lead to a murder charge—she agrees to maintain silence about the infant, whose body the man goes off alone to bury in the woods.

In the final pages we learn that, while the baby’s mother went on to have something of a normal life, the young man, unable to live with the burden of guilt and secrecy, killed himself. The narrator is on the verge of getting married to someone she describes as the love of her life. She has told this person the full story of the serial killer but nothing of the rest. The day of the big wedding is near. The book ends with her pondering whether she can allow her beloved to marry her without knowing the whole truth. She decides to make a full confession, knowing that it may well cause her to lose her one last chance at happiness.

Hah, said my friend. A twist. Ends supposedly happily with a wedding but then sets up a cliff.

According to my high school English teacher, there are two kinds of novels. Half of them could be called Crime and Punishment and the other half could be called A Love Story. But when you think about it, a lot of novels could be both.

Crime and Punishment: A Love Story. Now that’s a good title. Anyway, don’t they say that every good story is a suspense story?

And every story is a love story.

And every love story is a ghost story.

And everybody loves somebody sometime.

Stop! she squealed. It hurts when I laugh that hard. (She was referring to her several surgery scars.)