The Replacement Wife by Darby Kane (2021) Let us now press on with our never ending mission to gobble up as many of these domestic psychological thrillers to the point where we.....nah, there's no stopping point.....we'll just keep reading them.
This one we jumped on right away, since we greatly enjoyed Darby Kane's previous 2020 outing in the genre, "Pretty Little Wife" (see our post on 1/26/21).
Maybe a more appropriate title for this one would be "Creepy little Brother-In-Law".....
Elisa's a loving mom to a toddler son and loving wife to her husband Harris. But she's coming apart at the seams, dealing with the PTSD from witnessing the shooting murder of her employer. Even worse, she's not quite feelin' the love anymore for Josh, Harris's younger brother whom he's spent a lifetime looking after and protecting.
Josh's romantic life is disturbingly problematic, to say the least. His previous fiance Abby, a BFF of Elisa's, disappeared without a trace and ole Joshy's wasted no time lining up a spankin' new girlfriend, Rachel......much to Elisa's dismay.
Poor Elisa soon finds more dismay headed her way.....she's grown deeply suspicious of Josh, who was married before he met Abby, to a woman who just happened to die in a freak accident at home.(Or did she? Feel free to insert the pounding of an ominous piano chord here.....)
When she furtively launches her own amateur investigation of Josh's unsettling past that's littered with dead and missing women, Elisa gets no support from Harris. His love and devotion to his brother pretty much blinds him to all the creepy coincidences in Josh's....uh.....checkered love life.
As for Josh, he comes off as a maddening, cheerful sociopath and his sly, clever gaslighting of Elisa leads everyone to believe she's become unhinged in her obsession with incriminating him for his fiance's disappearance and his wife's death.
And who's the mysterious redhead that Elisa's constantly glimpsing out of the corner of her eye? Real or imagined? And is it possible Josh's not the only one in this cast of characters holding on to dark, dark secrets? Time to hit that piano chord again......
We greedily lapped up all the Hitchcockian plot twists and surprises that Darby Kane leaves strewn along way, right up to the climactic good vs. evil showdown. And of course, the author remembers to thrown in that one extra final page twist.....(we're starting to wonder if publishers contractually require that very last "Gotcha!" of all their thriller writers......)
For fans of this genre like us, another fine keep-you-up-all-night read.....we say check it out soon. 4 stars (****).
No comments:
Post a Comment