I was in my twenties when I shoved everything I owned into a couple suitcases and boarded a plane for the Netherlands. It’s a story so common it’s almost cliché–I moved across the planet for love–though it’s a good thing that relationship panned out because I had no idea what I was in for. Turns out that starting over in a foreign country is so much harder than I could have ever imagined.
At first, I thought it was as simple as trading one life for another. Different city, different language, same me. But reinventing yourself in a foreign country means rebuilding from the ground up, often without tools you didn’t know you needed. Everything was unfamiliar—the grocery stores, the street signs, the small talk that didn’t come naturally in a language that sounded like gibberish. I didn’t just feel like an outsider; I felt invisible, isolated, insecure. Off-kilter all of the time. And it’s that emotional cocktail— discomfiture mixed with raw vulnerability—that makes the expat experience the perfect starting point for a thriller.
In a foreign setting, you don’t know the rules, which means you also don’t know when someone is breaking them. You don’t know the customs, so you’re on guard all the time. Even benign encounters carry a charge of uncertainty: Are they being helpful or underhanded? Is their friendliness a ruse, and if so, what do they want from me? When you’re in survival mode, everyone and every interaction feels like cause for alarm.
Rayna learns this all too well in The Expat Affair, when she arrives in Amsterdam after a failed marriage and with a bruised identity. She comes in search of adventure and she finds it, in a drunken night with a handsome stranger. But the next morning that man is dead, murdered in the shower while she slept off the booze in the next room. The diamonds he’d casually shown her the night before are missing from his safe, and Rayna, still trying to get her feet under her new life in Holland, is the obvious suspect.
It’s the kind of moment where the bottom falls out but in a foreign country becomes ten times worse. Rayna doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have anyone to call, doesn’t have anyone to trust in a city thousands of miles from home. She’s flying blind, a foreigner in every possible sense. Emotionally. Culturally. Linguistically. Worse, she’s found herself entangled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse—chased through Amsterdam’s alleyways, pressed for answers by men who claim authority but radiate threat, and hunted for diamonds she didn’t steal. There’s a target on her back, and no one to rely on but herself.
Her desperate bewilderment is something I tapped into from my own early days, when I was walking around in a constant fog of uncertainty. For an expat, even the smallest choices—take the shadowy alleyway or the long way home? ask for directions or pretend you know where you’re going?–feel significant. Every option comes with a million risks you’re too clueless to know how to predict. Every stranger is a puzzle you can’t quite solve, their social clues unreadable, their motives impossible to guess. It’s exhausting…and incredibly useful if, say, you need your protagonist to question every person she meets.
While the danger in The Expat Affair is fictional, the fear, the reinvention, the feeling of being completely unmoored in a foreign city—that part, I know. Like Rayna, I arrived in the Netherlands hoping for an adventurous new beginning. Like Willow, I eventually found my footing, but it took way longer than I expected when that plane touched down. And like both women, I learned that being far away from home changes you. It strips you down and forces you to rebuild in ways that more often than not feel wildly uncomfortable. But it can also be hands-down the best thing you’ve ever done.
Ultimately, that’s what The Expat Affair is about. Not the stolen diamonds or the danger, not the cat-and-mouse game or the chase through Amsterdam’s dark and seedy underworld. It’s about what it means to start over, and how hard but also how transformative that can be. It’s about becoming someone braver, someone more adaptable, the kind of person who can walk into a city filled with strangers and find a friend.
A real heroine’s journey, two women who dared to step into the unknown and rewrite their own endings.
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