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Product details
- ISBN 9781529983685
- Weight: 144g
- Dimensions: 130 x 197mm
- Publication Date: 02 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Vintage Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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When the woman you love may be dead, or worse - unknowable - obsession takes over.
A young woman is found dead in her Manhattan apartment. In the aftermath, the men who knew her begin to tell their stories: a possessive mentor, a devoted fiancé, a cynical columnist. At the centre of it all is Laura: dazzling, ambitious and impossible to pin down. As Detective Mark McPherson pieces together her life, he finds himself drawn not just to the crime, but to the woman she seemed to be....
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days
Vera Caspary was born in November 1899 in Chicago. Her working life began as a stenographer at a Chicago advertising agency, but she was determined to become a copywriter, and despite many setbacks in a male-dominated business, she eventually achieved her aim in 1920. She then moved to New York to write for magazines, and also began writing stories which drew on her experiences as an independent, career-minded modern woman. Caspary wrote twenty-one novels in total, including Bedelia (1945) and Stranger than Truth (1946), but Laura was her first major success. Published in 1943, it was adapted for the big screen just one year later by Otto Preminger. The film version is still feted as a classic early noir and its theme tune has become a jazz standard. Caspary also wrote several successful screenplays, and received a Screen Writers Guild Award in 1957. In 1949 Caspary married the producer Isadore Goldsmith after a long-standing affair. She was hounded by the McCarthy witchhunts for her communist leanings, and published an autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-ups in 1976. Vera Caspary died in June 1987.
