You think you’ll stay the same – you won’t. Infidelity will change you forever. There can be no going back.
Kirsten Calloway knows she should be grateful. She has a stable marriage, decent job, and a wonderful teenage daughter. But she also has a raging libido that won’t shut up, and a husband who’d rather go on a bike ride.
She bumps into an old friend at a school reunion who faces a similar problem. Dianne, though, has found the answer: a discreet agency which arranges casual sex for people just like them, people who want to keep their marriages but also scratch that itch.
Enter Zac: younger, handsome and everything Kirsten could hope for in bed. For a while, they seem to have it all. Kirsten even finds herself becoming a better wife and mother. But Zac wants more – a lot more, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it.
Sexually charged, shocking and relatable, Reckless is a profound exploration of marriage, motherhood and desire.
Book Information: Print Length: 316 pages. Publisher: Welbeck. Publication Date 22 July 2021
About the Author:
RECKLESS is my first novel, but I have written for TV and film before this. Like many people, I was given my first TV break by THE BILL. It used to go out three times a week, 30 mins per episode, and had a well-earned reputation of giving young writers, directors and actors a chance. I learned a great deal from working on it, then went on both to write my own shows (TRUST, THE DEBT) and other people’s (SPOOKS, WALLANDER, MERLIN etc). After managing to sell a spec script to Hollywood, I worked for a while rewriting screenplays – a sort of script doctor. But this left no time for my own work, so I veered back to TV before deciding to see if I could write a novel. RECKLESS is the result. Although I started it back in 2018, a lot was written during lockdown, when it was a welcome distraction. Hope you enjoy it!
My Review:
If you are a middle aged woman with grown up kids, in the midst of menopause wondering where the past twenty or so years have gone and if this is IT now, then Reckless will probably tickle your fancy, especially if nothing else is tickling it right now!.
This story opens with an extract from a British Transport Police report on the discovery of the body of an unidentified man at a railway cutting. Who is he and how did he die? Those are the immediate questions you ask yourself, but when we are introduced to Kirsten, who is the main narrator and the focus of the police investigators lots of other questions start to emerge.
Kirsten is a fabulous character, relatable, likeable, bloody hysterical at times, searingly honest and believable as a middle aged, seemingly happily married, working mother with 1 teenage daughter with whom she has a difficult relationship with. Tired of her current life, squabbling with the daughter, being ignored sexually by the husband, feeling invisible as a wife and mother, Kirsten starts to question herself and try to bring that spark back to the bedroom.
Unfortunately for Kirsten the only spark her husband is interested in is in the kitchen under the hob. So when she goes to a school reunion and accidentally sees a “happily married” old school friend being serviced on the hood of a car by someone who is definitely NOT her husband she starts to consider having a “no strings attached” affair.
Obviously the fact there is a body in the story, means that not everything goes to plan and the reader is taken on a journey back and forth from the moment Kirsten’s life changes to the discovery of a body.
I thoroughly enjoyed this story, learnt so much and laughed a lot too. The section on FIGGING made me laugh out loud and now I can’t look at a plate of sushi without thinking of where that ginger might have been.
