Consuella's Thrill

Beautiful, widowed Constance—a.k.a. Consuella—clings to a terrible secret, torn between three men from Monte Carlo to Coney Island. One wants to love her. One wants to ravish her. One wants to kill her. Consuella’s Thrill, a sinuously twisting tale of forbidden romance and shocking vengeance, moves from the Brooklyn slums to an elite Monte Carlo hookup club to a penthouse over the Coney Island beach. Cuozzo’s genre-bending first novel upends geographical expectations—and taboos. A chance midnight incident at a Brooklyn housing project peels open a rabbit hole to a nautilus-shell spiral of tormented love, sexual obsession, and unimaginable terror. Fetching, early-forties poetry teacher Constance Mallory Ravenal experiences comical as well as sensual episodes in her pursuit of erotic gratification following her husband’s murder by a jealous mistress. Her rebranding as “Consuella” propels her from one bedroom fiasco to another. Along the way, a horny psychiatrist exposes cheating husbands to their wives, and cats are used as murder weapons. A seductive foot rub by close friend Melinda compels Constance to reveal an unspeakable secret. She’s stalked in Monaco’s sunlight and shadows by predators who kidnap children off beaches to enslave them in the adult film underworld. Only an NYPD captain with secrets of his own and a mysterious young ex-con—strangers to one another—can protect her. But why do both men hesitate? What sinister thread binds Constance, her suitors, and the villains? Consuella’s Thrill is a yarn compelling from start to finish—and impossible to put down.