Kate Jameson is in her mid-forties, happily married to a great guy with two children and a generally wonderful life in San Francisco. At a dinner party, she meets a man named Peter Ash who, like Kate's husband, is a lawyer. Kate feels an immediate attraction to Peter, which she confesses to her best friend, Beth Tully, an SFPD homicide detective. Beth, like any other rational person, the reader included, understands that it would be extremely foolish for Kate to even think about getting involved with Peter Ash; the consequences could be devastating and might destroy her virtually perfect life.
Kate naturally agrees with this logic, right up until the point where she doesn't. She lures Ash into an encounter at a hotel where the two of them have a mind-blowing sexual experience, even though Ash also realizes that this is a Really Stupid Thing To Do. Kate insists that this is a one-time-only experience, and good luck with that idea. Inevitably, of course, the dominos begin to fall; a homicide will occur; the case will be assigned to Beth Tully; any number of lives will be destroyed, and the world will never be the same again.
I understand that normally intelligent people do really dumb things all the time, especially in the sexual arena. But the problem here, at least for me, is that the author gives us no good reason why either Kate Jameson or Peter Ash should do such a thing. If either, or both, were unhappy in their marriages, their actions would make more sense. But Lescroart sets them up in a nearly perfect world where both of them appear to be leading about the best lives anyone could possibly imagine. Again, I just couldn't buy into the premise that either one of them, let alone both of them, would so casually jeopardize the lives they had worked so hard to build up to that point. I'll look forward with a great deal of enthusiasm to the next Hardy/Glitzky novel, but I certainly don't need to meet these characters again.
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