My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing
My rating: 3/5 cats
the best thing about this book is that i read it in a day during a period otherwise defined by an inability to sit still or focus on anything for long.
me in march: “hey, i don’t have to go to work for how long? great! now i can read all the books and write all the reviews and what a blessing it is to have time! !”
me in may: *read a page* stare into distance *read a page* “do i have any brown sugar left?” *read a page* “why is that wall so streaky?” *read a page* “who was that actor in that thing?” and then at the end of the day there’s a half-washed wall, five cookbooks splayed open on the floor, the cupboards are reorganized and potentially-expired items are cluttering the table awaiting their fate (still), there are fifteen tabs open in my browser, several reviews have been attempted and abandoned and maybe twenty pages have been read. also, i am weeping.
so, to the few books that were able to distract me from my…distractions, you have all of my gratitude &thank you for your service.
HOWEVER—objectively speaking, this is a perfectly good psych suspense thriller that didn’t live quite up to the fanfroth, considering it’s got the same basic bone structure as one of its literary antecedents so, you know, we’ve been here before, just with different wallpaper.
still, i liked the energy, i liked its swerves even when i saw them coming, although some i was maybe too ‘ronadumb to get? there were plot points whose significance went over my head, the most maddening of which was the deli. was that just a red herring/coincidence, or am i being obtuse?
there’s a lot packed into this one—it’s the kind of criminal mastermindery with many working parts where strategies hinge on making accurate predictions about unpredictable variables, so disbelief-suspension is necessary and by the end it’s cluttered with scaffolding that wasn’t really supporting anything. unless—again—’ronabrain.
in any event, i’m glad i read it, and since i had the same gulp-it-down reading experience with her second book, He Started It, anything she writes in the future will automatically be on the list to the club that is me.
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