The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen
My rating: 4/5 cats
every time i read a review where a book is “praised” as being “compulsively readable,” i roll my eyes.
ev. er. y. time.
and i don’t know if this particular book has received that lazy praise-umbrella anywhere, but in general, it’s one of those overused empty-calorie assessments that tells me nothing about a book but is taking up space and time where i could have been reading something more useful. which is how most karen-eyerolls are earned. and yet… i gulped this book down, i got mad when i had to pause in my reading of it to sleep, get off the train, go to work, look both ways for traffic (i read while i walk down streets), etc, and while i’m not here claiming it’s the literary masterpiece that’s going to change books forever, it is – dare i say??
COMPULSIVELY READABLE!
this book was an unsolicited bonus book that st. martin’s sent along way back when they sent me an arc of Emma in the Night for review. this arc had a plain white cover, the pub date was 7 months away, and it was written by two authors*, none of which were pushing this book to the top of my stack: i’m easily swayed by cover art, i’m always wary of books written by more than one person, and i had a mountain of arcs with closer pub dates that needed my attention. so i put this one off for a while, figuring it was just one more hastily-written book being plopped onto the neverending conveyor belt of middlebrow marriage-based psych suspense.
but nooooooo – this is probably** the best psychological suspense i read all year (and i read a few), and i liked this one more than Emma in the Night, so thank you for the unexpected treat, st. martins!
i was just being silly up there, but there really is something compulsively readable about this book. it’s a breezy, easy read, but i don’t mean that in a bad way. i’m not sure how to articulate it – it’s unchallenging without being unambitious, if that makes sense. because this had to have taken pretty rigorous plotting and outlining for all the twists and reveals to land***, so it’s damn ambitious (damnbitious™!), but it goes down like pudding. and along the way, there are a couple of lumps in the pudding – not enough to ruin the taste, but enough to make you pause and say “hmmmm,” and try to figure out what those lumps signify, and i, for one, did not figure it out until the authors wanted me to figure it out. which is exactly what i want out of a book in this genre.
so – many kudos and much gratitude to those involved in writing and editing this book. it was so much fun (where the definition of “fun” is modulated to take into account the genre standards of people being horrible to each other), and very surprising.
so no spoilers, suckers! get your own pudding!
* and i’m not a book snob – no one who has read as much monsterporn as i have is gonna have any judgment left in them, but i do know my own preferences, and one of the authors has published a number of books whose cover montage of “back of a woman gazing out in contemplation at the sea/the woods/some other vista” made me think they would not be aligned with my particular tastes. i prefer action to introspection in my books.
** it’s either this or Sometimes I Lie
*** and it’s very rare for them all to land in such an early arc, so give the editorial team a pizza party
