First Train to Babylon by Max Ehrlich

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 1959. Bantam.

George and Martha Radcliffe are considered the ideal couple in the elegant suburb where they moved when his career suddenly took off, allowing him to buy a magnificent house with a garden and ensure a standard of living more than comfortable for the family. Their quiet routine is upset one day by the arrival of a letter, sent ten years before, but never reached its destination by a fatal coincidence. From that moment on, the union that seemed perfect in everyone's eyes turned into a nightmare and mutual trust began to crack, until it dug a chasm between the two. Tortured by doubt and suspicion, Martha investigates the menacing letter that shows her an unknown face of her husband, venturing into sordid environments and contacting people far removed from those in his environment. Before her there is an impossible dilemma: to choose between blind love and the search for truth at any cost. In an inexorable crescendo of tension, silences arouse misunderstandings, omissions generate lies, subterfuges become threats. The enemy is inside the house. An event that could happen to all of us. A novel of great atmosphere, which gives us back the charm of the fifties, and that at the same time is surprisingly modern in the portrait of a bourgeois family with impeccable appearances and an ambiguous soul.