A Little Bit Bad A Novel

By: Cassandra Neyenesch

Published by S&S/Summit Books, 2026-05-05

A wickedly funny, “compulsively readable” (Sophie Stava, author of Count My Lies) novel about a San Diego housewife whose obsessive love affair with her neighbor’s roofer is interrupted by a murder.

Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbor’s anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret.

Now it’s three years later and Nando has been murdered.

As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like hers ever be the mother her children deserve?

And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?