Any Place I Hang My Hat - A Novel

The day after her lavish wedding anniversary bash, Rosie Meyers gets a big surprise: Her nouveau riche husbandRichie is leaving her for a sultry, sophisticated, size-six MBA. When he's found murdered in their exquisitely appointed kitchen, no one is surprised to find Rosie's prints all over the weapon.

The suburban English teacher is the prime suspect. The police's only suspect. And she knows she'll spend the rest of her life in the prison library unless she can unmask the real killer. Going on the lam into Manhattan, Rosie learns more about Richie than she ever wanted to know. And more about herself than she ever dreamed possible.

It was a situation from which half-hour television comedies are made. "Marcia! In tonight's episode, Marcia Green's warm and winning and wise and wonderful Jewish family reminds her that she is thirty-five, divorced, and childless."

That's Marcia on her close relations. True, she's one of the best speechwriters around in the tough world of New York's smoke-filled rooms, but her family wants something else for her. No, not that Irish person she's living with. Another doctor, or at least a dentist.

But Marcia claims she's happy, getting plenty of the two things that exhilarate her most: sex and politics. She's not looking for commitment, and certainly not looking for a wealthy Harvard-educated man-about-town who is every mother's dream. Yet as wise mothers everywhere are fond of saying: you never know.

Call her superficial, but Susie B. Anthony Rabinowitz Gersten assumed her marriage was great -- and why not? Jonah Gersten, M.D., a Park Avenue plastic surgeon, clearly adored her. He was handsome, successful, and a doting dad to their four-year-old triplets Dashiell, Evan, and Mason. But when Jonah is found in the Upper East Side apartment of second-rate "escort" Dorinda Dillon, Susie is overwhelmed with questions left unanswered. It's bad enough to know your husband's been murdered, but even worse when you're universally pitied (and quietly mocked) because of the sleaze factor. None of it makes sense to Susie -- not a sexual liaison with someone like Dorinda, not the "better not to discuss it" response from Jonah's partners. With help from her toughtalking, high-style Grandma Ethel who flies in from Miami, she takes on her snooty in-laws, her husband's partners, the NYPD, and the DA (is the person arrested for the homicide the actual perp, or just an easy mark for a prosecutor who hates the word "unsolved"?), as she tries to prove that her wonderful life with Jonah was no lie. Susan Isaacs brilliantly turns the conventions of the mystery on end as Susie Gersten, suburban mom, floral designer, and fashion plate, searches not so much for answers to her husband's death as for answers to her own life.

It's 1940 and Linda Voss, legal secretary extraordinaire, has a secret. She's head over heels in love with her boss, John Berringer, the pride of the Ivy League. Not that she even has a chance--he'd never take a second look at a German-Jewish girl from Queens who spends her time taking care of her faded beauty of a mother and following bulletins on the war in Europe. For Linda, though, the war will soon become all too real. Engulfing her nation and her life, it will offer opportunities she's never dreamed of. A chance to win the man she wants...a chance to find the love she deserves.

Made into the movie of the same name starring Melanie Griffith, Michael Douglas, and Liam Neeson, Shining Through is a novel of honor, sacrifice, passion, and humor. This is vintage Susan Isaacs, a tale of a spirited woman who wisecracks her way into heroism and history--and into your heart.