"You must read Bedelia"--the seductive black-widow thriller by the author of the classic film noir Laura (The New York Times). Charlie Horst has returned with his new bride Bedelia to his family home in Connecticut. Indulgently infatuated, Charlie is the luckiest man alive. What's not to love about Bedelia? She's gorgeous and complacent. She's also a gracious and ideal party host--luscious and decorative in blue velvet. And in public, she plays the part of worshipful wife to perfection. In private, even more so. Who can blame Charlie for overlooking her little deceptions? Or for not paying any mind to her contradictory claims about her past? When Charlie falls ill due to a freak poisoning, Charlie knows that Bedelia will be right his side, watching him closely. But who's watching Bedelia? "Vera Caspary wrote thrillers--but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered--the psycho thriller" (Huffington Post) and this "sinister entertainment" (The New Yorker), is Caspary at her most chilling. Adapted in 1946 into a film starring Margaret Lockwood, Bedelia is "a tour de force of psychological suspense . . . Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity" (Liahna Armstrong, President Emeritus, Popular Culture Association).

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 For many women around the world, their greatest risk of HIV infection comes from having sex with the very person with whom they are supposed to have sex: their spouse. The Secret situates marital HIV risk within a broader exploration of marital and extramarital sexuality in five diverse settings: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. In these settings, the authors write, men's extramarital sex is an officially secret but actually widespread (and widely acknowledged) social practice, rather than something men do because their bodies demand it and women can't stop them. Drawing on research conducted as part of an innovative comparative ethnographic study, and modeling a novel approach to collaborative anthropological scholarship, the authors show men's extramarital sex to be a fundamental aspect of gendered social organization. Through theoretically sophisticated yet lucid writing and vivid ethnographic description, drawing on rich data from the marital case studies conducted by research teams in each country, they trace how extramarital opportunity structures, sexual geographies, and concerns about social risk facilitate men's participation in extramarital sex. Also documented throughout is the collision between traditional ways and the new practices of romantic companionate marriage.

Felix is a happy man. He runs a bookshop in London, and his wife, Marisa, is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful. After an event on their honeymoon in Florida, Felix went from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else.