Perfect Strangers

Perfect Strangers, by J.T. Geissinger, was published in 2019. Geissinger is the author of over 30 novels published in two dozen languages, and her work frequently appears on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Perfect Strangers, like many of Geissinger’s novels, blends the elements of several genres, including dark romance, comedy, thriller, crime, and mystery, while also incorporating a metafictional twist. The complex story centers on themes like The Unwieldy Force of Sexual Desire, The Pleasure of Mystery, and Shaping Reality Through Storytelling.

This guide is based on the 2019 J.T. Geissinger, Inc., e-book version.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of mental illness, illness, child death, death, violence, graphic sexual content, and cursing.

Plot Summary

Olivia Rossi, the first-person narrator, is a 38-year-old acclaimed writer. Her four-year-old daughter, Emerson Luna Ridgewell, was recently killed by gunfire, leading to the dissolution of her marriage with Christopher (Chris) Ridgewell, the current United States Ambassador to the United Nations (UN). Her literary agent, Estelle Perkins, has an eclectic apartment in Paris, and she invites Olivia to stay there for the summer to relax and hopefully write. 

At a nearby sidewalk cafe, Cafe Blanc, Olivia meets James Blackwood, an artist who draws portraits of people in grief. James is attractive, commanding, and sensitive. He recognizes Olivia’s pain and wants to draw her. Olivia tells her close friend Kelly Haynes about James, and they have a flippant conversation about him and sex. Estelle’s building has a courtyard, allowing Olivia to see and hear her neighbors, Gigi and Gaspard, having intense sex. When Olivia hears Gigi and Gaspard again, she masturbates to a fantasy of James.

Estelle’s apartment building manager arranges a cocktail party, and James and Olivia meet again. Their interactions are flirty and quarrelsome. James sends her tulips and takes her to dinner. He notices her “sad eyes,” and he comforts her while she cries in the bathroom.

James and Olivia have several intense sexual encounters. Though they vow to keep their relationship informal—no personal questions—they regularly suggest to one another that they might be in love. In addition to sex, the couple routinely discuss gender norms, beauty standards, and the masculinity of Ernest Hemingway. The novel has four parts, and each part starts with a Hemingway quote.

One day, James suddenly travels to Germany. Later, during a meal with Olivia, he gets a suspicious phone call that leads to another abrupt departure. Using diction from the science-fiction movie The Matrix (1999), James offers to tell Olivia the truth, but he thinks she’d prefer to remain ignorant. Kelly’s husband works for the FBI, and Olivia asks him to look into James. He confirms that James is an artist and reveals that James has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease)—a terminal condition that causes the muscles to atrophy.

Worried about Olivia’s safety, Chris travels to Paris and confronts James. Olivia becomes skeptical of both men. Chris wants Olivia to return to New York, where a security team can watch her at all times. He argues that he has “enemies,” and they’ll use Olivia to get to him. Conversely, Chris maintains that Emerson’s death didn’t involve him. He repeats the police’s conclusion: She was a victim of “gang wars”—a bullet hit her when it should’ve hit a gang member.

Upset by Chris and the painful memories he triggers, Olivia breaks her phone. James replaces it with an encrypted phone used by governments. On the secure phone, Olivia tells James that Chris wants her back in New York. James tells Olivia that she’s in danger and orders her to hide in his apartment until he returns from Germany. In James’s apartment, Olivia finds his guns and flees to a hotel.

Using the phone’s GPS, James finds her in the hotel, but Chris’s enemies pursue them. After a shootout, James and Olivia drive to a plane that James pilots, and they fly to Provence. They drive to an idyllic village where James has a rustic mansion surrounded by lavender fields. Olivia finally discovers the truth: James is an assassin. He tells her that he won’t kill women or children: He only targets men who have caused demonstrable harm. 

Through James, Olivia learns that Chris uses his position to engage in the illicit international arms trade. She finds out that Chris was working on a chemical weapons deal and a delay caused him to ask for additional money. Upset over the price gouging, the people he was doing business with hired an assassin to kill him. The assassin was incautious and shot Emerson instead. James tells her that the assassin who killed Emerson is in Germany, and he promises to bring back the man’s severed head. James keeps his promise, but Olivia can’t look at the head. 

Olivia finishes an autobiographical novel about her and James, and she discovers that she is pregnant. James quits his job and suggests he’d like to be the parent who stays home with their child. He brings home a wall calendar that features pictures of fall on the East Coast. The calendar’s sponsor—the Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, New York—causes Olivia to scream and her life in France to vanish.

The narrative reveals that Oliva’s experiences with James in France were a product of her imagination and mental illness. Olivia is a patient at the Rockland Psychiatric Center. She has ALS, and she accidentally killed Emerson by hitting her with Chris’s old SUV. Chris is her husband, but he’s neither handsome nor a powerful government figure—he’s a mechanic who’s having an affair with a woman in her twenties. 

Olivia’s psychiatrist diagnoses her with “catatonic psychosis,” and she tries to trigger the state so that she can return to James. In the meantime, she publishes a bestselling book about her experiences. Finally, the scent of lavender bush reunites her with James. They kiss in the rain and confess their mutual love.

In the Epilogue, the third-person narrator adds another twist to Olivia and James’s story. Olivia discusses her novel, Perfect Strangers, with her literary agent and reveals that the entire story—her romance in Paris and her time in the psychiatric center—is a work of fiction. Olivia and her agent discuss the book’s metafictional aspects and its relationship to Olivia’s reality. Olivia and James are married, but they live in the suburbs of New York City. James is an artist, but he’s not an assassin. He remains attractive, and his and Olivia’s sex life is still robust. It is also revealed that Emerson is alive when their daughter comes home from school.