Title: My Lovely Wife
Author: Samantha Downing
Publisher: Berkley
Release Date: March 26, 2019
Pages: 396
Book Source: Hardcover
“Our love story is simple. I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams, and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored.
We look like a normal couple. We’re your neighbors, the parents of your kid’s friend, the acquaintances you keep meaning to get dinner with.
We all have our secrets to keeping a marriage alive.
Ours just happens to be getting away with murder.” – Amazon
Kim’s Review
I loved the premise of My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing. Sure people have referenced that it’s a cross between Dexter and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and there are similarities, but I really liked how Downing took a look at how murdering people with your spouse takes a toll on your life and that of your kids.
Although there was constantly something going on, My Lovely Wife was still a slow burn for me. The personalities of the narrator (never named) his wife, Millicent, and their two kids, Rory and Jenna are so well developed. Downing does this perfectly by spreading it out over the book. You aren’t force fed all the details at the beginning, Downing coaxes it out of her characters like Millicent torturing her victims to find out all of their secrets.
I knew early on where it was leading, but that didn’t stop me from quickly turning the page to read all the details that would get me to the finale. While this is a book about serial killers, to me it wasn’t super graphic, which just added to the horror when something disturbing was revealed.
Normally for a thriller, if I figured out where it was going early on, I would give it four stars or less, but like I mentioned before, I really enjoyed Downing’s take on how murdering people can affect (relatively) sane people’s lives.
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