One of the comments that we’ve gotten about The Mistress is that people weren’t satisfied with the ending.

For a long time, this really confused Joshua and myself. There may be spoilers here, so go buy the book, read it, return here and discuss with us J

So, now that that’s out of the way…

We really feel it ended well. The mystery was wrapped up, the killer was caught, and Eva was free to finally process everything that had happened to her. Sure there was no loving embrace and happily ever after, but this book wasn’t really a romance. It was a mystery erotica where Eva wasn’t loyal to any one man. While she greatly enjoyed Dr. Sinclair’s company, it wasn’t like they were dating.

They simply had a mutual respect and attraction to one another.

The other ways we could have ended it I don’t think would have been satisfactory. Her consoling her lover while he grapples with the loss of his wife? While he has to deal with moving on and finally being able to process his own grief?

There’s no happily ever after there. Not for a while.

Human beings are complicated creatures, and I think it does them a disservice to gloss over the very real fallout to something like The Mistress.

How would he feel, knowing that his wife was killed while he slept with another woman? I imagine guilt, shame, and revulsion would be high on the list of things he’d be feeling. He would likely need time away from his lover in order to come to terms with everything.

So what could Eva’s happily ever after be? Finding her distraught lover and consoling him? Perhaps that’s indeed just what happened, but I think that after having their lives scrutinized for so long they would like to deal with that privately.

Besides, we have much more planned for Eva Perkins! So we didn’t feel an utter need to close things up entirely. We like to keep people guessing, and while we try to always have a satisfactory ending, it’s not usually going to be a wind-swept hair and boundless smiles one.

I don’t want to spoil any of our other books, but no doubt our fans have noticed how much we appreciate and love their own creativity, and sparking that is important to us. We want to leave people thinking about and talking about our books, and part of that is leaving things unspoken.

Perhaps we should have done as we initially thought and ended on a sex scene, but we felt that a time skip of fairly significant proportions would be required to make it seem natural.

In the end, we do what feels right for the story, and for the characters.

Whether you love it or you hate it is up to you.