RAINY DAY EXCERPTS: “THE WIFE”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, originally hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea and now hosted by I’d Rather Be at the Beach; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is a recent download:  The Wife, by Alafair Burke, a stunning domestic thriller in the vein of Behind Closed Doors and The Woman in Cabin 10—in which a woman must make the impossible choice between defending her husband and saving herself.

 

Intro: (Prologue)

In an instant, I became the woman they had assumed I’d been all along:  the wife who lied to protect her husband.

I almost didn’t hear the knock on the front door.  I had removed the brass knocker twelve days earlier, as if that would stop another reporter from showing up unannounced.  Once I realized the source of the sound, I sat up straight in bed, hitting mute on the TV remote.  Fighting the instinct to freeze, I forced myself to take a look.  I parted the drawn bedroom curtains, squinting against the afternoon sun.

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Teaser:  The few times I’d seen Olivia in person, she seemed so normal.  Better than normal, really.  Sexy, confident, a little bit mean. (63%).

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Synopsis: When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, had other plans, and they married the following summer. For Angela, the marriage turned out to be a chance to reboot her life. She and her son were finally able to move out of her mother’s home to Manhattan, where no one knew about her tragic past.

Six years later, thanks to a bestselling book and a growing media career, Jason has become a cultural lightning rod, placing Angela near the spotlight she worked so carefully to avoid. When a college intern makes an accusation against Jason, and another woman, Kerry Lynch, comes forward with an even more troubling allegation, their perfect life begins to unravel. Jason insists he is innocent, and Angela believes him. But when Kerry disappears, Angela is forced to take a closer look—at both the man she married and the women she chose not to believe.

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I enjoy any kind of domestic thriller, so this book went on my wish list from the moment I heard about it.  What do you think?  Would you keep reading?

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