PINTEREST
BLOGLOVIN
GOODREADS
Published by Bloodhound Books ( 7 May 2018)
Available in ebook and paperback
244 pages
Source: ARC/review copy
| About the Book |
Julie is devastated to learn that her husband, Paul, is having an affair. It seems her life can’t get any worse – until she comes home to find his dead body in their bed.
When the police establish he was murdered, Julie is the obvious suspect.
To protect her son from the terrible situation, Julie sends the teenage boy to his grandparents in Edinburgh while she fights to prove her innocence.
With all the evidence pointing to her, the only way she can escape conviction is by discovering the true identity of her husband’s killer.
But who really did murder Paul?
The truth is never straightforward…
| Review |
Life as she knows it ends for Julie when Paul, her husband of 20 years, forgets his phone and she sees some compromising texts. The only thing that stops her from confronting him straight away is the fact that their son Dan is sitting his final school exams and is stressed enough already. However once they are over she intends to deal with it. Unfortunately for her she never gets the chance because a short time after Paul is found dead and it transpires not from natural causes. Of course the police make Julie their number one suspect and she ends up in a whole heap of trouble. Her nightmare begins!
With a cast of duplicitous and unreliable characters, this story is pure suspense. I didn’t find it easy to engage with Julie and at times found it difficult to get on her side. The story is told from her perspective and there were times when I wanted to shake some sense into her as some of her actions seemed so ridiculous and each bad decision led to another bad outcome. Then, there were other occasions when I felt immense sympathy for her, especially when having to deal with Dan’s grandparents who were not the easiest of in-laws.
The suspense increases throughout the book as we follow Julie’s attempts to find out who killed her husband, leading to a dramatic conclusion. Many of the characters are either unlikeable and/or untrustworthy and when those closest to her distance themselves from her it was clear that she was on her own and it was up to her to prove her innocence.
Having read and enjoyed a few of Leigh’s longstanding police procedural series, I was looking forward to a change of direction with this standalone thriller. I have to be honest. I wasn’t entirely convinced about some aspects of the story; I’m not a fan of first person narratives generally and I think that’s probably why the book didn’t entirely work for me. This is just my personal opinion and other people will have their own preferences. Having said that, I did enjoy it, it was an extremely readable and addictive story and unusually for me, I raced through it in just a few hours.
I understand that this is the author’s first psychological thriller, in which case it gets off to a flying start. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next time.
My thanks to Sarah Hardy and Bloodhound Books for the tour invite and the ARC to review.
At the time of publishing this post, The Adulterer’s Wife can be downloaded from Amazon UK for 99p
| Author Bio |
Leigh Russell, author of the internationally bestselling Geraldine Steel crime series, has sold well over a million books worldwide.
Her novels have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Turkish. Reaching #1 on Kindle, her books have been selected as Best Fiction Book of the Year by the Miami Examiner, voted Best Crime Fiction Book of the Year in Crime Time, a Top Read on Eurocrime and shortlisted for the John Creasey New Blood CWA Dagger Award, long listed for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award, and a finalist for the People’s Book Prize.
Leigh studied at the University of Kent, gaining a Masters degree in English. She serves on the board of the Crime Writers Association, chairs the Debut Dagger Judges, and is a Royal Literary Fellow
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