Review: Chantilly Lace

Evelyn Kincaid, Chantilly Lace, (2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244024174-chantilly-lace

One woman’s psychological journey from emotional abuse to healing

53-year-old Nora is moving house, after her third divorce. Either running away from South Dakota or running toward San Diego. Facing her failures. But her sister Rachel says all three were gaslighting her. Can ‘geography fix what’s broken inside’?

She’s looking on dating sites for married men. No commitments, no expectations. All she finds is d*** pics. Until ‘BenSD’; he wants ‘an honest connection’. She signs her response ‘Chantilly Lace’.

I loved the metaphor of her slamming shut her laptop ‘as if the physical act could contain the vulnerability she’s just released into the digital ether’.

I was surprised when, just after the first online contact with Ben, she’s already worrying about ‘the way predators create false familiarity’. ‘Predators’!? If she’s that afraid of online dating, why is she doing it? I wondered why he was afraid of ‘visibility’ at the marina but didn’t mind her walking up his wife’s driveway in front of all the neighbours.

Is this a straightforward romance-gone-wrong story? It charts the psychology quite well. Words like ‘predators’, ‘edge’, ‘rawness’, ‘trap’, ‘trained’, ‘boundaries’, ‘cage’ hint at something darker on the horizon. Are Nora’s ‘attachment issues’ really the problem?

Nora’s healing journey is also charted well. The psychiatrist’s explanation of trauma bonding as ‘addictive, like a slot machine’ really got me thinking. The story the novel tells is an ordinary one – woman of a certain age has affair with married man – yet the damage Nora experiences is heavy. She doesn’t see it until she’s out of it.

The ‘psychological’ bit of the billing was very accurate. Having personal experience of an affair with a married man, it sounded all too familiar. Every woman who has this experience should read this book. There’s a lot of therapy-speak, but it’s valid – that’s why therapists use these phrases.

I must say, though, billed as a ‘thriller’, I was expecting a murder or some zombies or something. Ben is a jerk, but a pretty ordinary jerk, nothing seriously dark. It ends the way I expected it would. Disappointing, but then romance is not my favourite genre. I would call it more a psychological journey.