This book almost had me. Almost. “The Wife Between Us”, a 2018 New York Times bestseller, came as close as anything in the psychological thriller genre for me to recommend if not for the first third of the book which utterly ruined it for me.
The rest that follows is filled with major spoilers.
“The Wife Between Us” alternates between Vanessa and Nellie, the former is the ex-wife of Richard pursuing the latter who is his soon-to-be-wife. Part One focuses on a cat and mouse game between the two with Nellie knowing that someone may be pursuing her while Vanessa teeters on the end of sanity as she tracks Nellie down. Are you ready for the parlor trick? Turns out Vanessa and Nellie are the same person with Nellie’s timeline occurring several years prior to Vanessa’s story. FFS. (Nellie is a nickname Richard had give Vanessa when he first met her.) Hundreds of pages just for this stupid reveal. Nothing but a gimmick, a goddamn gimmick.
Oddly enough, I did keep reading Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen’s book because the story sucked me in like a good TV movie, you know the ones with commercials every ten minutes. In Parts Two and Three, we learn that Vanessa is actually pursuing Emma, who is now Richard’s soon-to-be wife and we discover the why Nellie’s Vanessa’s marriage with Richard ending and her reasons of pursuit.
I made it all the way through, but there’s no reason for you to do so unless you start on Part Two. My recommendation? Wait for this to pop up on Netflix.
(Buy)