Review: My Lovely Wife

Summary: Dexter meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this wildly compulsive debut thriller about a couple whose fifteen-year marriage has finally gotten too interesting…

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. -- Berkley

Wow! I picked up MY LOVELY WIFE by Samantha Downing not knowing how seriously twisted this book is. I should have known when the description compared it to Dexter that it would be quite the ride, but I honestly still can't believe the premise of this book! And I'm not sure what this says about me, but I seriously enjoyed it!

MY LOVELY WIFE tells the story of a husband and wife team who prey upon and then eventually kill women. Yes -- you read that right! I don't want to give too much of their backstory away because the reader is (gently -- haha!) eased into their story; but at its simplest, these two people fell madly in love, had kids, and struggled with money issues like any "normal" family. The only difference is that they got bored and found that killing people was exciting for their marriage!

I had such a good time with this novel. The characters are intriguing to say the least, and there are so many plot twists that will keep you not only guessing but totally shocked. I appreciated that the husband (who went unnamed) was the narrator of the story because his voice really added a whole other dimension to this book. It was really interesting to get inside his mind and see how he could be so normal at times and then so absolutely deceptive (i.e. he even pretended to be deaf so he could "get to know" women.)

The dynamics of their marriage and family were also really interesting. On one hand, the were like any upper middle class family -- balancing kids' schedules, making evening dinners, and finding ways to pay the bills. However underneath all of that, they were kind of a mess. Their teenage son kind of figured out that something with his dad wasn't quite right (although he didn't exactly realize the extent of his behavior!), and the younger daughter was a total mess due to the stress of women's disappearances and murders (and she didn't even realize it was her parents' who were responsible!)

Along with the character development, I also really liked the twists in this story. When a few things started to go wrong with the murders, this couple decided that they could outsmart the police. They both worked together (although I'd argue that they both kind of did their own thing too) and set up a man who had been released years ago for some suspicious crimes and subsequently disappeared. Pretty smart, right? I don't want to reveal what happens, but suffice it say, that things didn't go exactly as this husband and wife team planned!

The pacing of the novel is excellent -- this book is definitely a page turner, and I appreciated how the book worked up to its insane ending. Just based on the rest of the novel, I had a feeling that it was going to be a doozy... and it most definitely was. And just when I thought it couldn't get any crazier, it did! Now doesn't that make you want to pick up this book?

As you can tell, I really enjoyed MY LOVELY WIFE. Highly recommended for fans of twisted thrillers!

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy of this novel.