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In Our Secret Life
Hardcover
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher Price: $34.99
Publisher: Sly Dog Press
Published: Oct 27 2026
Pages: 390
Weight: 1.52
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Nobody suspects the schoolteachers. You wouldn't have either.
IN OUR SECRET LIFE is a novel about two of them: Jerry and Rita, sixty years teaching school, sixty years stealing.
The true case: in 1985, Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre was cut from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Thirty-two years later, valued by then at as much as $160 million, it was found behind a bedroom door in a quiet couple's home.
Every reporter circled the same disbelief: could two schoolteachers really have done it?
It does not solve the case. It imagines a marriage.
They meet in 1955, in the Catskills, two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight. He buys her pie she never ordered. She lifts a bracelet while he watches. Recognition becomes a pact, and the pact becomes a marriage: fifty-seven years, two children, a hundred countries, and a life no teacher's salary could ever explain.
Their first painting is a catastrophe. They carry it out of a Denver museum with their hearts in their throats and find they have risked everything they own for the museum's own copy. They laugh until neither of them can breathe. Then Jerry learns to leave a replica on the pedestal and a forged provenance in the file, and for the next fifty years nothing they take is ever reported missing.
Everything they steal, they sell. All but one. In 1985 a third woman enters their marriage and never leaves the wall behind their bedroom door: the winning ticket they can never cash and never confess.
Rita tells it herself, moving backward from her final days, as the illness taking her memory threatens the secret she guarded her whole life. The mind that hid everything is now trying to give it away, and the woman who spent a lifetime making the world look past her is fighting only to remember.
A love story. An art heist. A secret worth $160 million.
The headlines told you what was found. They could never tell you what was hidden: sixty years, two thieves, and the one thing neither of them ever had to steal.
Includes a reading group guide.
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