Save Me

A perfect life unravels in predictably painful and messy fashion in Lewis's (How Lucky You Are) tale of learning to let go. Thirty-six-year-old private practice doctor Daphne Mitchell is heartbroken when her cancer-specialist husband, Owen Monahan, announces he's been sleeping with a social worker 10 years his junior. Daphne begins to examine her broken marriage that seems beyond repair. Owen, on a parallel crash course when his affair ends tragically, grieves for two lost loves, and Daphne falls immediately back into a role that makes her wonder if she's trying to "nurse him back" into loving her. Daphne's mentors in her tortuous transition from prudent to adventurous are a reckless, troubled patient, a hotel business entrepreneur who opens tantalizing new horizons, and her own sister, who guides her to a realization that a once "comfortable normal" marriage was anything but. Lewis gets it just right in her examination of how tiny cracks can shatter in a marriage that gets "cemented in the fable" of what being together is supposed to be. (Jan.)