Tragic past of a sex pest’s wife
PSYCHO THRILLERS CHRISTENA APPLEYARD
THE WIFE by Alafair Burke (Faber £12.99)
THIS book is so timely it’s spooky. In New York, Angela Power’s celebrity professor husband, Jason, is accused of sexually harassing an intern — and then of doing something even worse.
The scandal is splashed all over the media and Angela must decide whether she believes in her husband’s innocence and, if so, how far she will go to protect him.
Her dilemma is that by protecting Jason she may be forced to reveal something about her own past that she is desperate to conceal.
This is a clever take on a subject that dominates the news every day but rarely reflects the effect that harassment cases can have on the wives of the accused men.
The plot is mostly engaging but the secrets of Angela’s back story are sometimes an unnecessary distraction from an already powerfully dramatic situation.
THE WIFE BETWEEN US by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (Macmillan £12.99)
IT’S easy to see why Steven Spielberg has snapped up the film rights to this book, which is an original take on a winning formula.
An unhinged, jealous ex-wife sets out to stop the wedding of her hedge fund manager ex-husband to a much younger version of herself.
The backdrop of glitzy New York high society is part of the successful formula — as is a mandatory excess of wine. The small twists and turns of the plot are riveting but the pivotal surprise is gobsmacking and it succeeds because of the scrupulous attention to the psychological details of all the characters.
THE PERFECT STRANGER by Megan Miranda (Corvus £12.99)
LEAH loses her job as a reporter and leaves Boston under a cloud to start a new life as a teacher in rural Pennsylvania with Emmy, an old friend. But an attack on a girl who resembles Leah and the sudden disappearance of Emmy catapults her into a fresh hell.
As she and a police officer investigate her friend’s disappearance, she finds herself questioning everything about her old life — which threatens the possibility of ever creating a new one.
As a lead character Leah is a bit too remote, but the author is good at building a menacing atmosphere and the book feels more like an old-fashioned horror story than a psychological thriller.