What does grief taste like? What does it weigh? How does it quietly curve around your heart, begging long-kept secrets to become unburied?

When history professor Jill Bowman learns of her husband’s gruesome murder in a seedy motel room, she knows he had no business being there—not serious, sincere Peter, the man she’d known in the most intimate ways a person can be known.

Enveloped in grief, Jill struggles to piece together what could have happened that night and slowly uncovers Peter’s secrets. But her search reveals dark parts of herself as well…secrets she’d never known she was keeping. The self-discovery forces her to reexamine her relationships with her family, her students, her mentally ill daughter, and the detective handling Peter’s case—to whom she finds herself inexorably drawn.

At once a shadowy, erotically charged thriller and a heartbreaking portrait of grief, Breathless explores the subtle and precious intricacies of a life upended by sudden death.


"Though Breathless, the fifth novel from the Massachusetts-based Smith, is a bona fide mystery, its thoughtful prose reads like one of Anita Brookner's introspective explorations. These are sentences you reread to savor even as you race eagerly after Jill to plumb that place she describes as 'between silence and word...the beguiling landscape of memory.'"
—People Magazine

“In Breathless...J.P. Smith does a stunning job of putting himself—and the reader—in the mind of a woman facing shattering revelations surrounding the violent death of her husband.”
—Boston Herald

Originally published by Viking Penguin in 1995.

Breathless can be purchased at most online booksellers, and through independent bookshops.