Mia by Leslie Bazzett

A stylish, unsettling work of psychological suspense about an American woman, adrift in Mexico for a year, whose chance encounter with a glamorous older expat spirals into obsession and betrayal.

There’s no one, there’s only you.

When Sally, an American living in San Miguel de Allende, meets Louise outside her children’s school, she’s eager to immerse herself more deeply in the life of the city. In Mexico for just a year with her husband, an architect, Sally is entranced by Louise—her elegance, her harshness, her stories about Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac—and the two quickly become inseparable. Soon enough, Louise has begun calling her Mia and, at first playfully, then in earnest, introducing Sally as her daughter to a growing circle of friends.

By turns enthralled with the possibility of a new identity in Mexico and troubled by Louise’s magnetic hold over her, Sally attempts to keep the relationship a secret from her husband. As the specter of Sally’s troubled childhood looms, and Louise’s self-mythologizing tightens its grip, the two women test the limits of reinvention—until their fictions threaten the security of Sally’s flesh-and-blood family.

A taut, beguiling work of psychological suspense, Mia is a mother-daughter story turned on its head and a high-intensity fable about the limitations of playing a role that doesn’t belong to you.