Review: 'The Wife Before Me' by Laura Elliot
Pub. Date: 8/24/2018
Publisher: Bookouture
One evening as the sun is setting, Amelia Madison’s car slides into the sea off Mason’s Pier. Her body is never found.
Two years later, Elena Langdon meets Nicholas Madison. She is grieving the loss of her mother, he is grieving for his wife. Together they can help each other.
Now Elena is living with Nicholas. But Elena doesn’t really know him. She doesn’t know what he is capable of.
And she doesn’t know what really happened to Amelia.
Until the day she discovers the torn page of a letter and the words she reads chill her to the bone.
Elena must find the person who wrote these letters if she is to save herself.
A totally breathtaking page-turner about the darker side of love and what really goes on behind closed doors. This book will have you gripped from the very first page until the dramatic final twist.
Domestic Thrillers have recently become a new favourite of mine. There is something about the domestic dynamic in thrillers that fascinates me: the everyday irritations that may or may not become reason for murder; the façade that hides a horrible reality; the pressures of domestic family life that boil over. It is all intriguing and I truly wonder how the COVID-19 lockdowns will affect this particular genre. Will it be something no one wants to touch, due to the actual horrid increase of domestic abuse and the general sense of loss and despair, or will it give a new twist to the stories? In The Wife Before Me, written well before our current pandemic, domestic violence plays a big role and I do think it is good to know that coming on. The descriptions are pretty rough at times, graphic and explicit, which will be triggering to some readers. While I sometimes wished Elliot had focused less on it, I also appreciate that domestic violence should not be swept under the rug. However, approach with care.
Elena is in love. She and Nicholas are the perfect solace for each other as she still grieves the loss of her mother and he grieves the loss of his first wife. Everything is perfect so of course she will move in with him. With each little acquiescence and compromise, Elena begins to lose ground. And then she finds a letter which changes everything. We also get the perspective of Nicholas' first wife, Amelia, whose story is also one of isolation and pain. The speed at which The Wife Before Me moves from almost a romance to stone-cold thriller could give you whiplash, but Elliot manages it very well. By the time all the different storylines from both Elena and Amelia's lives come together in the end it feels a little rushed, but overall I found myself very gripped by the story. I wanted only the best for Elena and Amelia.
Laura Elliot is a prolific Thriller writer and I could recognise her skill in The Wife Before Me. Many of the elements in the novel are traditional and expected of a Domestic Thriller, but Elliot manages to make something new and exciting with it. While many of the plot twists are also (kind of) expected, I still enjoyed the journey there. While at times the narratives of Elena and Amelia were almost identical, Elliot manages to keep them differentiated enough so the reader begins to care for both of them. As mentioned above, for my taste some of the descriptions of abuse in The Wife Before Me were too explicit, but they did do well to establish the dynamics. I noticed some issues like switching from first to third person, which may just be an issue of the ARC I had. This also added to the occasional confusion of who was narrating. However, I will most definitely be keeping an eye out for Laura Elliot's other books.
I give this novel...
3 Universes!
The Wife Before Me moves quickly from romance to thriller in its depiction of marriage gone horribly wrong. Read with caution!
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