My Russian Book

While her family thinks she is vacationing in Greece, Francesca Woodbridge- disguised by the wig, the dress, and the limp of an elderly woman - checks into a local hotel just blocks from her home. The reason for her deceit is twofold: to step outside of her life and observe it from a distance and to watch the comings and goings in her neighborhood for clues to potential suspects in her husband's shooting.

Ever since the night her husband Ren was wounded by an intruder's gun, Francesca has felt uneasy in their marriage and resentful of how Ren has changed over the years. Now, as an undercover spy on her own life, she scans her history in her unsparing, sometimes darkly funny search for clarity - from the idealistic days of college when she first fell in love, through the quiet disappointments that have collected in the depths of her soul, to her recent, unexpected, passionate affair with her Russian gardener, Yuri, whose sudden, unexplainable disappearance leads her to question just who she has become. As she seeks an answer, she meets people she could never have known in her "real" life and views people she thought she knew as strangers. As she reveals who shot her husband, she is forced to see herself in a bold, new, and entirely unexpected light . . .

Susan Bolotin

To me...[Francesca's] compulsion to see herself from the outside in doesn't feel like a falling apart; insteadit's more like a coming together — the need to meld self and identity that one usually associates with coming of age. And this is what I liked most about My Russian....McNamer is a careful writera master of the smalltelling observationbut her plotting slows things down. She could learn a lesson from Tom Wolfe: You can't try too hardor it shows. —The New York Times Book Review