Jamie untied my hands. I massaged my wrists—I hadn’t realized how stiff they had become. He helped me off the bed and stood me up, still blindfolded. “Good girl,” she said, hugging me. “You were a good girl.”

Until Jamie grabs her by the hair and forces her to confess to outrageous sexual acts, Nadine is sleepwalking through life, her marriage beyond mediocre. Suddenly her wild side, dormant since she wandered Asia a decade before, awakens and she experiences an erotic thrill she has never known. Hooked, she follows Jaime into a netherworld of seedy motels, whips, ropes, and blindfolds where anonymity conceals double lives.

Then Jaime’s corpse turns up, intricately bound, covered in welts and bruises. Nadine knows who the killer is. But when she comes forward with her story, the press and police label her delusional, an attention-seeking paranoiac. Devastated, she flees her marriage and her job.

As Simon pounds a man’s chest with a machinist’s hammer, he wonders what happened to his ideal of serve and protect. Staring fifty in the face, he wonders when he became one of the bad guys. He leads the investigation into Jaime’s murder, and when his underlings arrest a likely suspect, a dimwitted, frightened teenager, Simon doubts the boy’s guilt. Yet there’s a problem. He’s offered the early retirement deal he’s wanted for years, but under one condition: that he extract a confession from the boy and see him convicted of capital murder.

Nadine can turn her back on the murder of a woman she loved and save her marriage. Simon can ignore his doubts, see an innocent man convicted of murder, and get the respite he wants. As their lives collide, a young man’s life—and their own future happiness—hang on who they decide to be.

If The Story of O and Gone Girl had a bastard child, it would be Crimesex.

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