Review: What The Wife Knew

As romance readers we inevitably get sad when an author jumps ship to a different sub genre or another genre entirely. What we rarely talk about is when an author jumps ship to another genre and is really, really good at it. Case in point, HelenKay Dimon, who has written romances I've enjoyed but whose work writing thrillers under the name Darby Kane are just next level. What the Wife Knew is one of those books that starts with the author mashing her foot on the accelerator and not taking the pressure off until the final page. I'd been dragging my feet on starting it, but once I did? I didn't come up for air.

Dr. Richmond Dougherty was a national hero, survivor of an unspeakable tragedy as a teenager and now a renowned, celebrated pediatric surgeon. He is also now very much dead, thanks to an "accidental fall" in his opulent home in Rye, New York. Local suspicion immediately falls on his younger, mysterious and pretty second wife, Addison. They were married less than 100 days before his death and she kicked society mainstay Wife #1, along with their two teenaged children, to the curb. The irony being that if people knew the truth about Addison she'd look more guilty, not less. What nobody knows about their marriage? It was a ruse. Richmond had secrets, the kind of dark, damaging secrets that would ruin the carefully constructed farce that was his life. Addison somehow knows all his secrets and blackmails him into a marriage in order to utterly destroy him.  Someone killing him throws a wrench in her plans and now the unimaginative police are looking her way.

This story employs one of my least favorite suspense writing tics, that of the non-linear timeline, but Kane makes it work and milks it for maximum effect. The majority of the story is told from Addison's point of view, but we do get a few chapters of Richmond which further fleshes out what a sack of human garbage he was. Kane also employs short, snappy chapters and it succeeds in keeping the reader invested and off-balance for the majority of the book. What did Addison know, when did she know it, how are all the players involved in this very messy drama connected to the final outcome of Dr. Dougherty?

Despite him being dead, Richmond's paragon of virtue reputation is still very much alive and Addison, while somewhat thrown off balance by his death, still has her mission to dismantle the whole web of lies. Leading the charge to stop her is Wife #1, Kathryn, his two surly kids, various town residents siding with the influence of Wife #1 and the partners in Richmond's medical practice. The only person who might be on her side is her husband's former lawyer, and really - can she trust him?  The gated home she shared with Richmond soon becomes a revolving door of unwanted visitors hurling accusations and then the threats start arriving - You Will Pay. Addison still has plans for Richmond, dead or not, but it certainly seems like someone else has plans for her - namely to pin a murder she didn't commit to her chest.

The whole affair thrums along at a fast clip and while the ending devolves a bit into One Shocking Reveal After Another!, did I mind?  Reader, I did not. Thrillers are called thrillers for a reason - they work for me when they're fast, furious and suck all the oxygen out of the room. Kane does that here by employing enough deadly secrets, messy family dysfunction (boy howdy!), and plenty of rich, privileged assholes getting exactly what they deserve (for a change....) to keep those pages turning. Just an all around dynamite read - start to finish.

Final Grade = A

Review: The Engagement Party

2023 was the year I fell down a Darby Kane rabbit hole.  I burned through the first three standalone suspense novels and then patiently waited for The Engagement Party - a December release.  Touted as a mix of And Then There Were None and I Know What You Did Last Summer, I buckled myself in and got ready for a ride.  Unfortunately it was a ride I found bumpy and a little lacking.

Emily Hunt was murdered the weekend of her college graduation at an affluent New England liberal arts college. At the center of the mystery are her closest college friends, tragic Mitch, power couple Alex and Cassie, and emotionally bankrupt Will.  Emily's murder haunts all of them, naturally they know more than they're letting on, and they'll do anything to keep the past well and truly buried.

Then Will, poor dumb bunny Will, gets engaged. For like the fourth time, but who's counting?  His fiancée Ruthie wants to get the friends together to celebrate their engagement and picks a remote house on an island in Maine. As a storm is blowing in. Convenient.  Also joining this house of horrors is Sierra, Mitch's business partner - who also happens to be in love with him. They're not on the island long before random weirdness starts happening and the first body is discovered in the garage.

I'll be honest, it was the comp to And Then There Were None that made me pick up this book, and when that comp is dangled before me I just expect certain things.  I expect to hate pretty much everybody (check) and I expect nearly everybody to die (yeah, not so much).  I mean, half the fun of this type of story is that the characters you hate are the bodies that start dropping.  And while I quite literally hated everybody in this story, not nearly enough of them ended up dead in the end. Sorry, not sorry. In fact, the first two dead bodies are tertiary characters we never meet alive on the page. This is a problem because Kane does such a good job of making me hate everybody that to have most of them not die is just, well, a bummer.

I realize how this sounds, but if you're a suspense/thriller fan this is IYKYK kind of thing.

Sierra is the innocent bystander character that we, as the reader, are supposed to rally around. The one who gets sucked into the madness only because she's an idiot who's in love with Mitch. And ultimately that's what annoys me about her. Everybody in this story, literally everybody, wants to protect "poor, tragic Mitch."  Look, I get it - his childhood was jacked up. But he's such an unlikeable, almost passive aggressive in his sarcasm, character that I just wanted him to die.  And no, I won't tell you if he does or not.

Besides the fact that the body count isn't nearly high enough, the suspense thread is a blunt instrument. With a plot of this nature I want Machiavelli. Sorry, just do. I want twists, turns, who can you trust?  This is more like a cudgel upside the head. 

All that being said, there is a very nice twist at the end that I did not see coming and it was really good.  Unfortunately by then I just felt a little worn down by it all.  Too many of these horrible people left alive, not enough deviousness on the part of our villain. It's not terrible, but it's not really what I wanted.  And well, it's all about me.

Final Grade = C+

Review: The Last Invitation

My glom through Darby Kane's backlist finishes with her most recent release, The Last Invitation. I'm now officially tapped out and have to wait for her next book, which doesn't drop until the end of the year.  Like her previous two books, The Last Invitation was a helluva ride and I gulped it down like a thirsty man lost in the desert.  Unfortunately it didn't leave me with the same feeling of afterglow when I wrapped up the final chapter. 

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Gabby Fielding and her ex-husband, Baines, went through a rather messy divorce, but it's done - well as much as it ever will be. That doesn't mean she doesn't think he's an asshole for summoning her to their former home (now all his) to discuss who will get their daughter, Kennedy, over the winter holidays. She notices something is off right away, for one thing the door is unlocked and security alarm unarmed.  For another?  Baines is lying in a pool of his own blood in his study - dead from an apparent suicide.  At least that's what the cops are telling her and her brother-in-law, Liam.  The fly in the ointment? As much as Gabby wanted to throttle Baines she knows down to her bones that there is no way he'd commit suicide. And once she starts making noise about that?  The real trouble begins. A reporter crawls out of the woodwork blathering on about other powerful, dead men - set up to look like accidents or suicides. It's a conspiracy theory that Gabby doesn't buy into for a minute, until her life gets spectacularly upended.

Jessa Hall is a lawyer at a prestigious DC firm working a particularly messy divorce case with child custody issues.  She's ambitious and vying for partnership, but her latest case goes completely topsy-turvy with the husband making all sorts of accusations that start derailing her life and career.  At her lowest ebb she receives a mysterious invitation to join the work of The Sophie Foundation, an outfit run by her law school mentor. Jessa needs a way out of the mess she's in, the life she has worked so hard for (and by that I mean, the life she's built for herself by being sneaky, taking short-cuts and steamrolling over anyone standing in her way...) is slipping away.  She accepts the invitation, and gets more than she bargained for.

The Foundation is only one thing that connects Jessa and Gabby - they were friends in law school. That is until Gabby realized the type of person Jessa was.  The final nail in the coffin?  Jessa's firm represented Baines in the divorce and Jessa completely screwed Gabby in her drive to get ahead.  Now these two are on a collision course with The Foundation and neither of them is going to come away clean.

After the twisty-turniness of her first two domestic suspense novels, Kane goes straight-up thriller with this book. It's intrigue with a heavy dose of vigilantism - the women behind The Foundation manipulating what they perceive as a flawed justice system to right wrongs perpetrated by men against women.  Even if you understand the means to the end, it's all unraveling at the start of the story when the bodies of innocent bystanders start piling up like cord wood.  How did Baines come to the attention of The Foundation? The divorce was messy, but he wasn't abusing Gabby (and trust me when I say Gabby is no innocent). The reporter that shows up spouting conspiracy theories - what's his story and how did he get involved?  And the most troubling thing of all? Who is involved, how far do The Foundation's tentacles reach, and can Gabby stop the damage before her life is completely shot to hell.

This is a morally ambiguous and ethically messy story featuring characters that aren't easy to "like."  My own loyalties shifted multiple times over the course of the story (early on I liked Jessa - ha ha ha ha!) and for that reason I think this book would make a dynamite book club read.  There's a lot to chew on here and Kane (a lawyer) uses her experience with her former profession to great effect.

So, what's the problem?  Well, the ending.  There really isn't one. There's collateral damage to be sure, but when bodies start hitting the ground I like to know that the people responsible are going to pay the price - and they kinda, sorta do but not to my satisfaction. The Sword of Damocles life that Gabby lives throughout this book isn't really resolved.  Like, to a certain extent, she's going to be looking over her shoulder the rest of her days. A pound of flesh isn't extracted so much as a few ounces. And that's the rub - this lacks finality. A group can justify their "work" as a "means to an end" to achieve justice all they want - it still doesn't necessarily make it right.  I understand crafting an ending with finality is tricky with the story like this one, and again - dynamite recommendation for a book club read - but I like scorched and salted Earth. People are dead, and while some of them were terrible people, I wanted to know someone was going to answer for that - and I'm not convinced that they do.

Yes, I did inhale this story, but I felt a little deflated at the end. 

Final Grade = B-

Review: The Replacement Wife

After reading Pretty Little Wife back in February I knew I was going to blow through the rest of Darby Kane's backlist - but I ain't gonna lie - I wasn't exactly looking forward to The Replacement Wife.  Anyone who has read any of my reviews for domestic suspense novels over the past handful of years knows that Wendy, she isn't the biggest fan of the unreliable narrator. The heroine who is gorked out on pills, booze, or more likely a combination of the two and we spend the entire novel trapped in her claustrophobic, paranoid mind.  I like Female Competency Porn in suspense novels and these gals running around half-cocked, not playing the smart hand, I just can't.  And while certainly, there's some of that in this book, Kane puts her own spin on this Trope That Won't Die making this one the most pleasant surprise in my reading year thus far.

Elisa Wright is a wife and mother living a quiet life in a historic home outside of Philadelphia.  There's just one small problem - Elisa is convinced that Josh, her brother-in-law, is a killer.  His wife died in a tragic home accident.  Nothing odd there necessarily, or so Elisa thought at first.  Then she introduced Josh to her good friend, Abby.  They started dating.  They got engaged. And now Abby has disappeared.  Poof! Without a trace.  Josh is playing the victim card. She LEFT him. Just decided she didn't want to be with him, packed up her bags and took off.  Abby is artistic, flighty, she's a grown woman and there's no evidence of foul play.  Except Elisa and Abby were friends - and Abby has dropped out of Elisa's life as well.  Which doesn't smell right to Elisa, especially since Abby knows about the trauma Elisa had recently suffered.  Abby would call to check in.  Abby wouldn't abandon a friend.  Except she does.  Then Elisa finds Abby's laptop hidden in Josh's home that has a string of incriminating chat messages saved on it and Josh announces that he's met someone new. He has a new girlfriend and he's head over heels in love...

Elisa is well on her way to unspooling at the start of the story, having discovered the laptop innocently enough while at Josh's house to bring in a cleaning service. Harris, Elisa's husband and Josh's older brother, took on the defacto parent role after their parents died when they were young. The Josh Needs To Be Taken Care Of party line is well ingrained, and after discovering the laptop, Elisa realizes how she fell into it lockstep. But all this means that there's the very real concern that Harris may side with Josh over his own wife.  Harris who likes calm and order.  Harris who just wants his wife to get better already and instead she has stopped therapy and when she manages to go out it's within a very limited range near home. Now she's convinced that Josh did something to Abby.

Kane sets up her unreliable narrator by having Elisa experience a traumatic event (content warning: work place shooting).  She's on anxiety meds, but as a reader I never got the impression that those meds were being used as an "excuse" for her unspooling (which, thank the Lord because I would have been irritated).  What has Elisa unraveling is the fact that she's not adequately addressing her trauma and that she's found the incriminating laptop in Josh's home.  One dead wife, a missing fiancé, and in a matter of months he's madly in love with a new girlfriend?  AND SHE'S THE ONLY ONE CONCERNED! It smells rotten and Harris, while he agrees it's quick, doesn't share the concerns on the same level as she does.  

Pretty much from the jump the reader knows that something is rotten about Josh. We also know that someone is seriously screwing with Elisa, gaslighting her, and making her come off as completely unreliable and unhinged.  And Elisa struggling is believable to the secondary characters because of the traumatic event she survived.  My main issue here is that Elisa does have all her faculties. She's not mixing multiple meds, she's not mixing her meds with booze.  Honestly I wanted her to be smarter. If someone is gaslighting you and making you look unhinged - Dear Lord don't fall right into their trap.  Pretend that everything is fine. Don't come off sounding unhinged. Don't argue that you're the victim even if you are.  It's just going to make people think you're nutso, and you have the well-being of your young son to think about. Don't give them any rope to hang you with that would put your son in danger.

So yeah, she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer and she frustrated me - but let me tell you that this book is Twisty AF.  Look, Josh is up to no good. We know this.  We don't know the extent of it, but something is definitely off with that guy.  It's the secondary players that send the reader on a ride in this one.  Who can Elisa trust? Does she have allies? Or are the people claiming to be her allies the ones gaslighting the hell out of her?  It's 400 pages of this and yes it is exhausting, but I could not put this down. I had to push forward. I had to find out how it all plays out. I had to find out if Josh was a killer, what happened to Abby, and it did not disappoint.

Were there things about this book that I didn't love? Yes, Elisa not playing things smart annoyed me.  But what did I love? How frickin' twisty this was! It kept me guessing from start to finish and when I came up for air I felt slightly drunk afterward.  A real treat for domestic suspense fans to be sure.

Final Grade = A

Review: Pretty Little Wife

While Pretty Little Wife was Darby Kane's debut back in late 2020, it wasn't really. It was disclosed pretty early on that Darby Kane is HelenKay Dimon, author of numerous contemporary romance and romantic suspense novels. Kane's a new pseudonym for her foray into the world of domestic suspense.  

I've enjoyed Dimon's work in the past, some of her early books with the Kensington Brava line and her Harlequin Intrigues.  The single title romantic suspense novels she's published the last handful of years? Well, those haven't worked as well for me - which I was chalking up to my love of "short" (seriously, Dimon handled herself well within the very tricky Intrigue line...). So I was curious to see how she would work for me dropping romance and going all-out suspense and you know what? I got sucked into this book like whoa!

From the outside looking in, Lila Ridgefield has the perfect life. A former lawyer turned real estate agent, she lives in picturesque Ithaca, New York with her respected high school teacher and field hockey coach husband, Aaron. But nothing is as it appears to be, and it all comes crashing down when Aaron goes missing. Poof! Without a trace. Car, cell phone, wallet, Aaron - all gone.  The town is in an uproar - everybody loved Aaron, but Lila? Cool, aloof, never ingratiating herself, always on the outside. Normally the cops would sit back and wait.  Aaron and Lila had a fight a few weeks ago. He stayed with his brother for a time, and while he was back home now they were sleeping in separate rooms. He could have just taken off as part of another cooling off period.  Except it doesn't play that way to the lead investigator on the case, Ginny Davis. She feels it in her bones that something is off with Lila. There's more to the story than what Lila is telling them and Ginny is tenacious enough (and smart enough) to have Lila very worried.  And Lila should be worried. Especially since she has no idea how Aaron could possibly be missing when she left his body in a spot where he'd be easily discovered.

I'm coming to this book two years after the fact (oh Wendy, way to stay on brand) and a number of reviews I've since read take swipes at "predictability."  Folks, I've read a lot of suspense in my day. I mean, a lot. And is it predictable?  Yes, in hindsight. I probably should have known where it was going from the jump but...I didn't.  Why?  Because Kane employs a ton of subterfuge. We pretty much learn from the jump that Aaron is not the golden boy everybody in town thinks he is, but the rest of the characters get the onion treatment, with layers slowly getting peeled back as facts and clues are uncovered. When done right this technique never fails to suck me into a story, and I didn't want to come up for air once Ginny starts uncovering Lila's secrets.

It's hard to write a review for this story without spoiling too much, but a few things I think readers should know before going in.  First, there's three missing college women, so yeah - there's violence against women. Also, there's grooming - as in Aaron and his female students.  As mentioned, I've been reading suspense for a lot of years, but what adds another upsetting layer to these plot elements is that it's a book where there's a dearth of decent male characters.  Seriously, there's like one guy who isn't a sack of garbage.  And no I'm not telling you which guy it is because that would be a spoiler.  Normally this kind of thing bothers me. Just as not all men are awful, not all women are down with the sisterhood. I will say though that this didn't bother me quite as much as it has in other books. Why?  No clue. Maybe because I was sucked in unraveling Lila's secrets? Of the mystery of the missing girls? I mean, how does Aaron go missing when he's dead?  And have I mentioned how awesome Ginny is?  I haven't?  Well, she's awesome.

In the end I really enjoyed this story.  Was it predictable in hindsight? Sure, I guess? But man oh man, what a hell of a ride getting there. Much like Nalini Singh's foray into suspense a couple years ago, I'm ready to follow Darby Kane off a cliff.

Final Grade = B+