The replacement wife A novel

Darby Kane

Book - 2021

"Can one man be that unlucky? Elisa Wright is a mom and wife, living a nice, quiet life in a nice, quiet town. She's also convinced her brother-in-law is a murderer. Josh has one dead wife and one missing fiancée, and though he grieved for them he starts dating someone new. Elisa fears for that woman's safety, and she desperately wants to know what happened to her friend, Josh's missing fiancée. Searching for clues means investigating her own family. And she doesn't like what she finds. A laptop filled with incriminating information. Other women. But when Elisa becomes friends with Josh's new girlfriend and starts to question things she thinks are true, Elisa wonders if the memories of a horrible incident a y...ear ago have finally pushed her over the edge and Josh is really innocent. With so much at stake, Elisa fights off panic attacks and a strange illness. Is it a breakdown or something more? The race is on to get to the truth before another disappearance because there's a killer in the family...or is there?"--

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Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Detective and mystery fiction
Thrillers (Fiction)
Psychological fiction
Published
New York : William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Darby Kane (author)
Edition
First Edition
Physical Description
406 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780063117808
9780063119680
9780063205413
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Elisa Wright is convinced that her brother-in-law, Josh, has murdered his missing fiancée, Abby. It's crystal clear to Elisa: Josh's first wife died in a suspicious accident, and now he's showing no concern for Abby, blithely declaring his love for another woman he secretly dated before Abby disappeared. To everyone else, Elisa is caught up in PTSD-sparked paranoia; her slow recovery from a devastating workplace shooting makes her easy prey for Josh's relentless gaslighting campaign. Fortunately, Elisa has a secret weapon: Abby's computer holds correspondence linking Josh to the murder of another wife, Lauren, who's been hidden from the investigation into Abby's disappearance. Elisa determinedly battles increasingly powerful panic attacks to unveil Josh's murderous past and bring Abby home. Gaslighting and unreliable narrators are common in contemporary psychological thrillers, but Kane uses her relatable characters and tightly calibrated pacing (as she did in Pretty Little Wife, 2019) to give her story a compelling edge.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Elisa Wright, the protagonist of this convoluted domestic suspense novel from Kane (Pretty Little Wife), is in a fragile mental state following a traumatic occurrence at her former job in administration at a Philadelphia hospital. Now, 11 months after the incident, she's working from home part-time as an accountant and not venturing far from her neighborhood. Elisa becomes even more stressed after she learns that her brother-in-law, Josh Wright, just seven months after the mysterious disappearance of his fiancée, her friend Abby, is serious about a new woman. She's shocked by Josh's cavalier disregard for Abby's fate and begins to believe that Josh knows more about Abby's whereabouts than he's admitting. When she voices this opinion, Josh and her husband urge her to see a therapist or get additional medication. Are these remedies what she needs, or are they merely a means of distracting her from discovering the truth? Kane does gaslighting scenes well, but they get repetitive after a while, and Eliza takes too long to take even tentative steps toward regaining her sense of self. Kane has enough talent to suggest she can do better next time. Agent: Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary. (Dec.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

With one dead wife and one missing fiancée, brother-in-law Josh looks like a murderer to Elisa Wright, who's worried about both the fiancée (a good friend) and the well-being of the woman Josh is now dating. But even as incriminating evidence piles up, Elisa recalls a terrible incident from her past and wonders if she's simply losing her mind. From the author of the internationally best-selling Pretty Little Wife, a LibraryReads pick; with a 100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing.

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