The Penultimate Chance Saloon by Simon Brett

Soul searching was an unfamiliar exercise to Bill Stratton, and he found it intriguing as well as painful. He hadn't had much occasion for it in his life, given that he was fairly shallow, but then, on the verge of his sixtieth birthday, his wife told him she was leaving him for another man. He'd been under the impression they had a happy marriage. She assured him that for nearly forty years, in fact since the second week of their honeymoon, she'd known she was married to the wrong person. This all came as a bit of a shock to Bill. Hence the soul searching.

Brought up to be a responsible sort of chap, and hitting young adulthood just the wrong side of the sixties, Bill had not had much experience of dating (or sex, for that matter) before he met and married Andrea. Post-menopausal dating might be very different to dating in your twenties or thirties, but then he didn’t know much about either scene. Still, as a mildly famous television newsreader who’d managed to hold on to (most of) his looks, it seemed he was about to have plenty of opportunities to find out...

Simon Brett was born in 1945 in England and studied at Wadham College, Oxford. He has worked for the BBC as both writer and producer, and later for Thames Television. Mr. Brett has written and edited children's books, and his humour can be found in all his works and detective series'. A number of his works have been adapted to television and film, including After Henry, No Commitments, How to be a Little Sod, and A Shock to the System, which starred Michael Caine. A former president of the British Crime Writers Association and presently chair of the Society of Authors, Mr. Brett lives in the South Downs of England with his wife and three children.