Verity and Linden Lockwood vowed to spend the rest of their lives together, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do they part. Five years later they've kept their promise to never let their love die, to never slip into becoming one of those couples ...
But a year after Linden is brutally and inexplicably murdered in their picture-perfect home, Verity's world shatters again. They're not the golden couple she thought they were. Linden betrayed her: he had been having an affair.
Determined to uncover the identity of the other woman, Verity delves into her husband's life. Everyone is a suspect: her neighbour, her best friend, her assistant ... even her cousin. But as she unearths Linden's shocking secrets, Verity realises she didn't know her husband at all and the truth might be more dangerous than she realises.
Can Verity expose the other woman before she joins her husband in the morgue?
Good lord, this book was just as messy and convoluted as the affair at the center of it. And unfortunately, not even in mildly an entertaining way.
To start, there were simply too many side characters to keep track of. I understand the author was trying to create a long line of red herrings to keep readers guessing, but instead of intrigue, I mostly felt irritation. Yes, Linden was a creep who clearly couldn’t keep it in his pants, that point was made abundantly clear early on. I didn’t need an endless rotation of 'is she or isn’t she the mistress?'; when it felt painfully obvious from the beginning who the real one was.
And sadly, Linden wasn’t even the most frustrating part of this book. Nearly every side character was just as deeply unlikable. Addison came across less like a grown woman and more like a jealous teenager throwing a tantrum anytime Verity had a life outside of her. Flora practically walked around with a neon sign announcing she had secrets, Collette openly hated her own boss for reasons that never felt fully justified, and Amy remained so cold and cryptic that every interaction felt exhausting. Then there’s Mimi. Who is supposedly Verity’s best friend, but she abandons her the moment Linden dies and treats her terribly until the very end, only to reveal motivations that made absolutely no sense. Honestly, if I thought my best friend murdered her husband and set me up to find the body, I’d be calling the police, not playing emotional mind games.
Verity herself didn’t help matters. I understood her anger after discovering her husband’s infidelity, but her instant suspicion of everyone combined with her willingness to let people walk all over her made it hard to sympathize. At times, I found myself understanding how she missed what was happening right under her nose in the first place.
But what ultimately killed this one for me was the plot. It simply wasn’t strong enough to make up for the characters. The constant back-and-forth between “the wife” and “the other woman” chapters quickly became repetitive and, frankly, boring. I did not need sixty-one chapters to understand that Linden was a serial cheater, the mistress was naïve for believing he’d change, and, without spoiling anything, his wife wasn’t making great decisions either.
For a while, I held onto hope that the ending might pull everything together. Unfortunately, by the time the (completely unbelievable) twists arrived (most of which were easy to predict), the resolution felt wildly unrealistic, and I was far more interested in being done with the book than in how it actually ended.
Okay no, full disclosure; I was more interested in watching paint dry than how this story ended.
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