The Cost of Infidelity

He built an empire on a dead man's grave. She's come back for her share.Goiânia, Brazil, 2001. João Pedro Carvalho is thirty-four, with a mansion in the city's richest district, gold records on the wall, and the whole country singing his hits. He is the king of sertanejo, Brazil's country music. He has Luana, a wife who reads contracts down to the last clause, and a two-year-old son who rides his pony shouting, "Daddy, I'm like you in the video!" In those videos, computer-drawn cowboys gallop across farms that don't exist. He isn't the one who drew them.Thirteen hundred kilometers separate him from an apartment in Copacabana where, five years earlier, a man took forty-seven minutes to die. He calls that distance a new life. The past calls it a grace period.One hot afternoon, the doorbell rings. At the gate stands Patrícia Santos: her husband arrested by the Federal Police, forty-three reais in her purse, and around her neck the silver heart João Pedro himself once gave her."I don't want help. I want my dividends from your perfect life."The first payment is a hundred thousand. Then come the envelopes, the deposits, the whispered messages from payphones, the red dress in the front row of every show. Then the brick-colored lipstick, the same shade his wife wears. And a New Year's Eve party where three hundred guests sing the king's biggest hit in the garden while, upstairs, someone stops breathing.When the woman who ruined his life moves into the room next door and his children start calling her "Mommy Paty," João Pedro, who has never had the courage for anything, has to find out how far he is willing to go.Courage that comes late charges interest.The King of Sertanejo is a Brazilian noir of blackmail, guilt, and punishment, played out on packed stages, in marble mansions, and through long nights in Rio, in a Brazil of Nokias, payphones, and club sertanejo on every radio. For readers who can't put down a femme fatale, a buried family secret, and a villain you hate but can't stop following.Book 2 of The Cost of Infidelity. It can be read on its own, but it begins where The Fall of Matarazzo ends. Every debt has two dates: the day of the loan and the day of collection.Contains explicit sex and violence. For adult readers.