Stephen Aston is in the process of divorcing his first wife – after decades of marriage – in order to marry a much younger one. Not an uncommon plot, necessarily, but here, his current wife is living in a nursing home for people with dementia. Stephen’s two adult daughters—with their own deeply-repressed issues—not only can’t figure out why he is rushing to the altar with someone their age, but also don’t understand why their mother has started telling them how horrible Stephen has been to her throughout their marriage. Is Stephen the loving and supportive father and husband they always believed him to be, or is something else going on?
The premise of this was interesting – what kind of person moves his long-time Alzheimer’s-stricken wife into a care facility, divorces her, and then marries someone closer in age to his daughters than himself? Is he gaslighting all the women in his life who think that something is suspect in this situation or does trouble just coincidentally seem to follow this particular family?
While all the suspense really revolves around Stephen and his interactions with every other character, the main characters in this book are really the daughters – Tully and Rachel – and the new wife – Heather, as everything is told exclusively from their three perspectives. This helps keep the mystery and suspense going until the end, but the three women sometimes read more as to caricatures than actual people. This may have helped keep enough relatively hidden to allow for a couple of twists here and there, but unfortunately, it also made me care a lot less about what was happening to any of them and at some point, just kept reading to get to the end and see if I was correct about where it was ultimately going.
I’d recommend this book if you want a fast suspense novel that you don’t want to have to think to hard about or concentrate too much on, but if you’re looking for a book that keeps you on the edge of your seat trying to guess what might come next, unfortunately, this doesn’t really fit the bill.
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.