Kimberly Belle's "The Expat Affair"

Kimberly Belle is the Edgar Award winning, USA Today & internationally bestselling author with over one million copies sold worldwide. Her titles include The Paris Widow, The Marriage Lie, a Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist for Best Mystery & Thriller, and the co-authored #1 Audible Original, Young Rich Widows series. Belle’s novels have been optioned for film and television and selected by LibraryReads and Amazon & Apple Books Editors as Best Books of the Month, and the International Thriller Writers as nominee for best book of the year. She divides her time between Atlanta and Amsterdam.

Here Belle shares some ideas for an adaptation of her new novel, The Expat Affair:

If The Expat Affair finds its way to the screen, in my mind the casting wouldn’t start with the heroine or the villain or even the diamonds at the heart of the plot. It would start with the setting—Amsterdam.

The novel stars two women, both American expats living in Amsterdam. Newly divorced Rayna comes looking for adventure. What she finds instead is a one-night stand that ends in disaster: a dead man in the shower and a missing cache of diamonds that puts her in someone’s crosshairs. Enter Willow, a woman who’s been in the city long enough to learn which rules can be bent. On the surface, she has it all—an old-money marriage, fluency in the language and culture—but she still feels like an outsider. When her path collides with Rayna’s, the cracks in her carefully curated life begin to split wide open.

From a director’s point of view, this book would be a dream to film. Long, moody shots of narrow, cobblestoned streets at midnight. Fog rolling off the Amstel. A chase through the tangled alleys behind Leidseplein. The bikes, the canals, the flower stalls bursting with color but also hiding secrets. It’s a city with big contrasts, and big, main-character energy.

That’s what I think thrillers need when adapted for the screen—not just some great plot twists but atmosphere. Texture. A setting that breathes, where you can fall in love, get lost, or disappear entirely. Or, perhaps, where you can get away with murder.

Amsterdam isn’t just the backdrop of The Expat Affair. It’s the star.

Visit Kimberly Belle's website and follow her on Facebook, Instagram & TikTok (@KimberlyBelleBooks).

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--Marshal Zeringue