The Wife Between Us

Vanessa, recently divorced, drinking, living with her aunt and working in a department store, appears to be fixated on the young woman her wealthy ex-husband is about to marry.

The opening chapters establish this as a familiar situation, and the novel's first movement is entirely concerned with arranging the reader's assumptions about it.

Everything the first hundred pages appear to establish is a deliberate misdirection.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel's central device is a misdirection about who two of its narrators are and when their chapters take place, revealed roughly a third of the way through.

It is executed cleanly: nothing stated is untrue, and the deception relies entirely on assumptions the reader supplies. Rereading the opening finds it scrupulous.

Hendricks was an editor and Pekkanen a novelist, and the collaboration is their first, with several books following.

The division of labour is invisible in the prose, and the book is more tightly plotted than either writer's solo work, which is frequently the case with thriller collaborations.

Beneath the structural game is a detailed account of a controlling marriage: isolation from friends, financial dependence, surveillance, and the gradual reframing of the victim as the unstable party.

This material is considerably better than the plot mechanics and is the reason the book is worth reading.

The husband is charming, generous, attentive and dangerous, and the novel is careful to show why someone would marry him.

The characterisation avoids the common failure of making the abuser obviously monstrous, which would have made the victim's position unintelligible. The authors also give him a plausible history and a family, which keeps him embedded in an ordinary world rather than functioning as a device.

Short chapters, frequent cliffhangers, and a deliberate acceleration after the mid-point reveal.

The book is engineered for continuous reading and is very effective at it, with almost no passage that does not end on a reason to continue. The chapters are also deliberately uneven in length, with very short ones used at the points of highest tension, which is a simple and effective technique.

After the central disclosure the novel becomes a more conventional cat-and-mouse narrative, with additional reveals arriving at intervals.

The later turns are less well prepared than the first, and at least one depends on a coincidence the book does not adequately justify. The final movement also introduces a new character late, which is generally a sign that a plot has run out of the material it established.

Functional, present-tense in the contemporary sections, and deliberately unobtrusive.

The writing exists to deliver plot and does so competently. There is no stylistic ambition and the book is not attempting any. The two narrative voices are also less distinct than the structure requires, which is a real weakness given how much the deception depends on them.

It belongs to a recognisable pattern — the girl, the wife, the woman — that dominated the category's marketing for most of a decade.

The pattern is worth noting because it reflects a genuine commercial convergence, and several books in this section are difficult to distinguish by title alone.

The novel sets up a rivalry between two women and then reveals that the real antagonist is the man both are connected to.

The inversion is the book's thematic point and is the most defensible thing about a category frequently criticised for pitting women against each other.

It was a substantial commercial success and is among the better-constructed examples of the post-Gone Girl domestic thriller.

Its central trick has been widely imitated since, generally with less precision. The authors have written several further novels together, and the collaboration has proved more durable than most in the category.

Readers who enjoy structural deception and want a fast, well-engineered thriller.

It is best read knowing as little as possible, which makes it difficult to recommend specifically. Readers who dislike being deliberately misled should choose something else. Readers who found Gone Girl's structural games the most interesting thing about it will find this working in the same territory with less literary ambition.