What the Wife Knew: A Novel
“a pot boiler that moves quickly and keeps us guessing as to the outcome.”
“I'd never attended a funeral before, but I needed to be in the room for this one mostly to make sure the jackass in the casket stayed dead. I now understood why people dreaded these things. The weeping. The somber music. The recounting of stories no one cared about. The pregame week of casseroles.”
Just married Addison Dougherty wants her rich much older husband, Richmond Dougherty dead and she plans to make it happen. Afterall, she needs to strike first before he manages to kill her. It is, obviously, not a marriage founded on love and mutual respect. They each hate the other and have since Addison had finagled an introduction to him in a dark bar. That isn’t difficult at all. She is young and beautiful, he is a philandering successful physician, always on the make for a new conquest. She makes herself readily available—to a point. It doesn’t take long for her to lay out her reasons why they should marry and marry as quickly as possible once he divorces his long-suffering but intolerable wife. The wife has a tape revealing an incident in his past that would blow up the long-established reputation he has as an outstanding doctor and most likely land him in prison for life. And if she dies, she tells him, the tape will be released to the public.
Now, it is just a matter of time and Richmond has already had two mysterious accidents that would have accomplished Addison’s goal. But she doesn’t cause them. And when his battered body is discovered, and the bat she keeps by her bed to protect herself goes missing, Addison can’t celebrate yet. Sure, she should be happy she doesn’t have to murder him but then, who did, and why are they trying to set her up for his murder?
Could it be Kathryn, his high school sweetheart, wife, and mother of his two children? She certainly doesn’t like that Addison is living in the family mansion and the beneficiary of her ex-husband’s will. But as Addison, knowing the police suspect her of Richmond’s death, begins to investigate her husband’s past, she realizes that there are quite a few people who aren’t sorry about his demise and some of them obviously would be happy if she were to join him.
The suspects include his business partner, another physician, who has been hiding Richmond’s incompetency as a doctor and who stands to lose everything; the father of a young boy who died because of Richmond’s negligence during surgery; and another doctor who stood in for Richmond during the operation and has gone into hiding.
As if her life isn’t complicated enough—several attacks on her person, the poisonous attitudes of town’s people who believe she is a murderer, and an overzealous police officer who believes she’s guilty—Addison’s mother shows up. A man-eater with little disregard for her daughter except as an engine of revenge and now money, she stirs up all the feelings of rejection, loneliness, and anger Addison has tried to suppress over the years. And she too holds a secret, one that could cause big problems for Addison if she were to reveal it.
Darby Kane, a former divorce lawyer, is the author of Pretty Little Wife, a Book of the Month pick and an international bestseller that has been optioned by Amazon for a television series. She has written a pot boiler that moves quickly and keeps us guessing as to the outcome.