With “Her Last Affair” John Searles has written another hard to describe but wonderful novel. There is suspense to be sure, and thriller elements as well, as we watch the collision of three very different characters who end up at a rundown drive-in theater for a genuinely unsettling finale. But the book’s real power comes from the characters Searles introduces to us - a retired nurse who is going blind, a failed novelist, and an unhappily married woman who still holds a torch for a guy she loved years before when they both worked at DisneyWorld in Florida.
Searles keeps shifting his points of view - and includes many flashbacks - but he never loses control of his plot or the steadily mounting suspense. Searles is not one of our most prolific authors - “Her Last Affair” is only his fourth book - but the wait between novels is always worth it. In this episode John talks about his process of creation, the way his work as an editor and critic aided his fiction, and what it was like to see one of his novels turned into a movie.
