Amanda looked at herself in the mirror. On the outside, she was the perfect suburban housewife. Slender....Attractive, still, but not overwhelmingly so. Her hair was cut into a sort of soccer-mom pageboy that all the "girls" preferred....The breasts that James had bought for her...would be this shape until long after the rest of her body had turned to dust....

Perfect. All too perfect.

She couldn't have hated herself any more.


From celebrated Hollywood screenwriter Gigi Levangie Grazer comes this wry and luminous first novel of a young woman haunted by the memory of the man lost to her years ago.

Amanda McHenry had no idea 1985 would be the year she fell in love -- and the year her world would come apart. Fresh out of college, hungry for a shot in the entertainment industry, Amanda took a gig as a secretary in the offices of a sleazy television talk show. Saddled with looking after her drug-dealing brother, his junkie girlfriend, and their baby son, Amanda was nevertheless intent on making good things happen while her devoted boyfriend finished his law degree at Harvard. She had no intention of cheating on James -- until she fell for Gabe, her brother's passionate friend. Swept up in a whirlwind romance, Amanda realized that she would have to choose between following her heart or clinging to the safe and familiar. And when her brother's "career" threatened to destroy everything she held dear, Amanda's choice became a matter of life and death.

At once hilarious and devastating, gripping and deeply moving, Rescue Me is a uniquely suspenseful story about painful mistakes made in the name of happiness -- and the courageous attempt to reverse them in the name of love.