The wife between us

At first, it looks as if Hendricks and Pekkanen have written a book that's more romance than thriller. "The Wife Between Us" alternates between two points of view. One belongs to a young and apparently innocent preschool teacher who has been swept off her feet by a rich man - a hedge fund manager, no less. The other belongs to the man's hardbitten ex, a saleswoman at Saks resentfully catering to the spoiled matrons who used to be her peers. The rich man - lynchpin of the triangle - says laughably "intellectual" things and looks good in both a suit and a pair of jeans. Although the sinister elements may begin on the pale side, they soon suggest all sorts of gaslighting and bluebearding. When the rich man first meets the teacher on an airplane, he strokes a lock of her blond hair and says: "So beautiful. Don't ever cut it." Later, seemingly out of the blue, he buys her a house. And he insists that their honeymoon destination be a surprise. Meanwhile the ex-wife, who has a family history of mental illness, broods over her replacement. Not even the preschool teacher is exempt: She's trying to suppress memories of a night in Florida that ended with "police sirens and despair." The novel is halfway over before the first reveal, but it's worth the wait, if only for its singularity. Then the twists come fast and furious. Not everything makes a lot of sense. That stuff you thought was local color? A surprising amount of it fits in somewhere. Those characters with walk-on parts? A couple of them offer their own surprises.