A Little Bit Bad

Neyenesch’s darkly funny debut splices a murder mystery with a torrid extramarital affair between a sleep-deprived new mother and her roofer. Set to great effect in San Diego, the novel centers on Perdita Jungfrau, a middle-aged therapist mired in postpartum burnout and marital resentment, who meets sad-eyed anarchist-Marxist Nando Acuña, 15 years younger, while he’s working on her neighbor’s roof in 2007. They bond over music—she used to be in a feminist rockabilly band, which she describes as sounding like “Kate Bush falling down a flight of stairs,” and he plays drums. In 2010, after their affair implodes, Nando is gunned down in what may or may not be a random mugging, and Perdita comes to suspect that his wealthy ex-girlfriend—whose canyon-view home she envies—is stalking her. Neyenesch writes with scorching candor about the isolation and boredom that drives Perdita to pursue Nando with increasing desperation, “deranged by obsessive love.” To her chagrin, Perdita discovers that Nando “wasn’t hot in an offbeat way that was special to me—he was totally hot,” and something of a lady-killer. The plot hinges on a very substantial twist, but the book’s real power lies less in the whodunit than in Perdita’s singular interiority and caustic humor. There’s much to admire in this off-kilter story of a woman’s midlife crisis. (May)