The Replacement Wife by Darby Kane

 

This was a buddy read with my friend Heather, and you can read her review here. THE REPLACEMENT WIFE, in some ways, reminds me a lot of a grown-up version of the Point Horror books I read as a teen. Hear me out; it's a layer cake of twists, one piled on top of the other on top of the other, until the whole structure becomes an unstable mess of chaotic whodunnitry. I thought it was fun, and there a couple twists that literally made my jaw drop, but there was just SO MUCH.

Elisa is married to Harris and has a little boy named Nathan. Their picture perfect life is its own little solar system, satellited by her brother-in-law, Josh. Josh has terrible luck with women. His previous wife died mysteriously, and now his current girlfriend, Abby, Elisa's best friend, has disappeared. Now he's moved on... much sooner than she thought he would, and she's starting to suspect he's a murderer.

Major triggers in this book for gaslighting. Honestly, this works better as social commentary than a thriller in some ways, because of how it shows how casually dismissive we are when women turn up dead, and how quick we are to reduce women to shrill or mentally ill, when they're either justifiably upset, or justifiably traumatized by something terrible that happened. As a thriller, it's fine and it kept me turning pages, but it felt about a hundred pages too long.

I liked this book more than my friend and I think it was better paced than PRETTY LITTLE WIFE, which had a good twist but the journey was tedious. I actually think the emotionally distant narrative works here, because it's like Elisa is trying to remove herself from her trauma (something she even admits to herself at one point). But the writing was also very much all tell and no show and surprisingly clunky for a professionally edited work. It almost felt like a high quality self-published work in some ways, like it was missing that one final pass that would make everything perfect.

3 out of 5 stars