White Widow

Praised by the New York Times Book Review as "an...affecting morality tale," Jim Lehrer's devastating White Widow brings the reader to the brink of one man's unstoppable, ruinous passion for a complete stranger.

Jack T. Oliver has a solid marriage, a cozy house in Corpus Christi, and a job he loves as a driver for the Great Western Trailways bus line. In a few weeks, Jack is going to be promoted to Master Operator in recognition of his years of perfect service and on-time driving. It's a good life. Until a White Widow boards his bus, on a one-way ticket from Victoria to Corpus Christi.

A White Widow is a wild card, a woman traveling alone who can change the course of a driver's life, and not always for the best. What happens when Jack Oliver's White Widow passes through his life is as unforgettable as it is irrevocable. Within weeks, without ever even learning her name, he will fall passionately in love—and lose everything he has, a few things he never had, and some he never thought about until they were gone.

For the first time in paperback: the New York Times best-selling novel of passion and self-destruction in small-town Texas, by the admired anchor of PBS's NewsHour

Publishers Weekly

This 10th novel from renowned anchorman Lehrer (The Last Debate; The Sooner Spy) trades journalism and Washington politics for the flat highways of 1950s Texas, where Jack T. "On Time" Oliver drives a Trailways bus between Houston and Corpus Christi-until his overactive imagination begins to shake his simple world apart. Lehrer fills this wistful tale with interesting details of bus line procedures and legends, the most central being the eponymous "White Widow," every bus driver's ultimate dream woman who comes aboard and changes his life. Jack is weeks away from receiving the honorary gold badge of the "master operator," recognizing his seniority and high level of service, when he meets his White Widow, a beautiful Ava Gardner look-alike who rides his bus on Fridays. Although they've exchanged only a few words, Jack begins to concoct love fantasies, losing his concentration as he longs for each Friday's run. His driving begins to suffer, and his wife suspects him of cheating. One stormy Friday, with "Ava" riding across from him in the "angel seat," the consequences of his obsession become dire and irreversible. Lehrer convincingly uses bus driver lore, drawing on memories of his college job as a ticket agent. His delicate portrayal of Jack's life and inner thoughts heightens the story's poignancy. With its tragic elements, simple narrative and strong undercurrent of myth, Lehrer's tale lingers in memory like a sorrowful ghost story. (Jan.)

Known to television viewers as the nightly news anchor on PBS, Jim Lehrer has managed to find time to write more than a dozen novels, plus two memoirs and three plays. As he once admitted, he's known as "the TV guy who also writes books." Someday, Lehrer mused, "maybe it will go the other way and I'll be the novelist who also does television."