THE LAST GOOD DAY Lynn Schulman moves back to her quiet suburban hometown, to raise her family and escape from the pressures of city life. Instead, she and her husband Barry find the illusion of security being stripped away one layer at a time. First, a peaceful morning at the town's riverside train station is disrupted when a headless body washes up on the banks, in Barry's sight. Then the police detective who shows up to investigate the scene turns out to be a former boyfriend of Lynn's, who, it turns out, isn't over her by a long shot. He begins showing up unexpectedly at the couple's house, trying to rekindle his relationship with Lynn, and when that fails, he begins to stalk and menace Barry, edging them all closer to a dangerous confrontation that will change all their lives irreparably. A suspense story, that also functions as a social novel about contemporary mores and the tensions of ordinary life in the post 9/11 era. Read the first chapter. BUY THE BOOK from an independent bookstore, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. THE LAST GOOD DAY Paperback: 592 pages Publisher: Warner Books (August 1, 2004) Language: English ISBN: 0446614270 PRAISE "Riveting...Blauner has a fine ability to pile crisis on crisis...He builds a palpable sense of heartbreak and menace. Here's a suspense novel that truly hits us where we used to live before 9/11: in a warm nest of domestic assumptions...BOTTOM LINE: A very Good Day."    —Ron Givens, People Magazine "Excellent."    —New York Daily News "The Last Good Day is light years beyond a standard murder-mystery; it is a mesmerizing work of great American fiction. Blauner's story captures the frigid landscape of a crippled New York commuter town just two weeks after 9/11. This snapshot of crumbling affluence and numbing fear in America's suburbs is a masterpiece of prose and style, cover to cover."    —Nelson DeMille "Page-turning... Vivid... Well-crafted... Violent... [Blauner] captures the unavoidable daily connections of life in a small town. He's at his best on unrequited longings and simmering resentments fed by the town's blue-collar roots and newly arrived, if uncertain, affluence."    —Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY "Compelling... Memorable... Lively, sharp and up to the second... Perhaps Blauner's greatest accomplishment in The Last Good Day is evoking the feeling of unease we are so stuck with now... These familiar elements of unresolvable 'suspense' in our daily lives make Blauner's novel stick in the reader's mind after all his mystery's loose ends have been tied together."    —Marion Winik, Newsday "More than just another murder mystery... A biting commentary... With the precision of a surgeon, Blauner dissects the suburban culture."    —Orlando Sentinel "The characters are vivid, the secrets dark... A fun and poignant read."    —Philadelphia Inquirer "A page-turner in the classic sense."    —Hartford Courant "His prose style is tight. His dialogue is snap on, and his mix of social commentary and traditional thriller should appeal to a crossover audience."    —Booklist You know you're in the 'burbs when a cop's epitaph for a murdered local drug dealer is, "Man, he was an asshole, but he had a beautiful lawn." In his fifth novel, Edgar-winner Blauner (The Intruder, etc) imagines an idyllic suburb up the Hudson River from Manhattan, full of karate moms and commuter dads; in the shadow of September 11, he peels away the affluent veneer and exposes the roiling class tensions and frustrated ambitions beneath. The decapitated corpse of a local housewife is spotted floating in the water by commuters waiting for the inbound 7:46, including Barry Schulman, counsel for a start-up pharmaceutical company now teetering on the brink. Barry's wife, Lynn, a mother who's had to relegate her passion for photography to a hobby for the kids' sake, was the victim's best friend. To her horror, the investigating officer, Michael Fallon, has had his long-dormant passion for Lynn awakened by the case. Fallon, a struggling blue-collar nth-generation Irish-American cop, has dark secrets to hide concerning his prior involvements with both Lynn and the victim, which in turn necessitates his withholding information from his "former best friend" (now the town's first black police chief) Harold Baltimore so as to keep his prying rival, "a pugnacious Puerto Rican" named Paco Ortiz, from making Fallon the prime suspect. Harold, Lynn, Michael and the victim all went to school together, and the uneasy tensions arising from their uneven rises to various stations in life fuels a dangerously explosive tinderbox of resentment. Readers who can follow Blauner's intricate plot will be well rewarded, but only at the very end—no giveaways here. Forecast: This isn't escapist fiction—Blauner's world is frighteningly real—but sales-wise that should serve the book well in the long run    —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Author Peter Blauner has written five increasingly alert, astutely observant, and ambitious novels centred upon crime and social dismay, and now rampant post- September 11th societal disarray. His latest book The Last Good Day proves to be the break-through landmark one that blithely leaps over the more banal and pedestrian genre conventions, landing firmly upright on all fours as a genuinely wrenching and bloody literary work. One that evokes the tradition of Greek tragedy wherein small human flaws gather momentum heedlessly until events combine relentlessly and all hell breaks loose, with plain folks reverting to their primal roots as a competitive and possessive species."    —Alex Grant, Hackwriters.com "Peter Blauner shatters the calm surface of everyday life in his riveting new novel. The Last Good Day has everything you want in a thriller—smart dialogue, a plot that draws you in and speeds you through the pages, and suspense that is as relentless as a stalker."    —Linda Fairstein