My Husband's Wife

This was both a disappointment and an annoyance. An intriguing premise spoiled by a structure composed entirely of implausibilities, massive coincidences, unlikely events and a host of unreliable narrators. Indeed, no-one tells the truth in this tale so ultimately it all becomes a bit pointless. There’s only so many times the author performs a “rug pull” based on some stupid coincidence or action before it just becomes very frustrating.

On top of the structural issues there are glaring lapses in believability. The place name (“Hope Falls”) doesn’t sound British, let alone Cornish (The gazetteer of 300,000 place names contains not a single town or village the name of which ends in “Falls” - but if this was a Robyn Carr novel based in the US it would be great…)

And the author doesn’t seem to have made her mind up about just how big the place is. Sometimes it is a remote, tiny fishing hamlet but it still supports an art gallery that is full of people on a winter evening. And the (frankly unbelievable) “Bay of the Dead” procession involves hundreds of tourists, despite there being a single (closed) pub.

Everything in this story exists only to mislead the reader and none of it is remotely convincing. And that saddens me as Alice is clearly a good writer and the basic idea is really interesting but we need more verisimilitude to ground ourselves and the story in and at least one character we can actually trust and like!

So I can’t recommend this. I read it all so I could give a faithful review but the more I read the more frustrating it became. Even the “explanation” at the end, while it did try to justify and tie up all the unlikely happenings felt like a “bait and switch”. Reader beware!