Jaded

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History meets Carola Lovering’s Tell Me Lies in “an addictive campus novel that slips a knife beneath the ribs of desire, marriage, and power” (Chelsea Bieker, bestselling author of Madwoman): When a mysterious young woman comes between two married professors, their carefully crafted cat-and-mouse game crumbles, as prey becomes predator.

It’s the summer of 1986 on the Kelsey College campus. Sam and Vera Ward got married decades ago and haven’t slept together since. With little desire to satiate Sam’s sexual appetite, Vera agrees to a certain tradition at the start of every school year. Sam is allowed to sleep with one woman of his choosing, with two ground rules: she must be a student at the college, and the affair cannot last beyond a year. This year, their target is a mysterious young woman named Jade, who, unbeknownst to the Wards, is a hand grenade poised to destroy everything they’ve carefully built.

Alluring and sharp as a tack, Jade breaks all their rules. With a plan of her own, she holds Sam in the palm of her hand and grips Vera in a dance of obsession and desire. What unfolds is not a romance but a reckoning, where every touch conceals a move, and every secret becomes a weapon, spiraling into an explosive ending that will leave Vera, Jade, and Sam completely undone.

Jaded is an electric, provocative novel about power, the abuse of and submission to it, where each character is forced to confront the messy web of complicity, lies, and lust in which they have unwittingly entangled themselves.