Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen team up for the first time to give us The Wife Between Us, the first of many expertly co-written thrillers from the duo, and like many of you I was riveted!

Vanessa was married to handsome, successful, perfect Richard for seven years before she lost everything in their divorce. She is determined to stop him from marrying again so soon after the demise of their relationship. Fueled by copious amounts of wine and cynicism, she stops at nothing to come between him and his new fiancé.

Nellie is a bright young pre-school teacher by day and burger-slinging waitress by night who can't believe her luck in having found someone as wonderful as Richard to take care of her, comfort her in her most anxious moments and sweep her off her feet. But someone is watching her...

Despite being a little let down by the "big twist" revealed after Part 1 (I predicted it pretty much 2 or 3 chapters in), I still really enjoyed this novel! Often times I felt that I was almost bored, but the writing was so good and the narration by Julia Whelan was perfection as it always is from her, so I bumped it up from 3 to 4 stars. Also assisting that bump was the prologue. That was one twist I did not see coming! Though I'm not sure I believe that particular character's motivations, I still thought it was really clever. Definitely had no idea on that one, which was a pleasant surprise after figuring out the twist that defined this novel as shocking for so many of its readers. I just think after reading "Goodnight Beautiful" by Aimee Molloy, I can spot an unreliable narrator from 100 miles away. That book has ruined me for other psychological thrillers!

Thrillers are always tough to review without giving away crucial plot points. Actually, reading some of my friends' reviews on this site made this thriller totally transparent so I am going to try and keep this brief and opaque. I thought The Wife Between Us gave us really nuanced, complex and interesting characters. I thought their emotional wounds lended themselves extremely well to their actions, even if those actions were often over-the-top. What was also interesting to me was how our own poorly considered choices can skew our perception of how other people view us or act towards us, creating false narratives in our head that can eventually have too much control over us. The portrayal of a marriage under such tight lock-and-key was both heartbreaking and all too real for many married people out there, and the example of how an unhealthy relationship can change a person was I thought a great reminder to really evaluate what is important to us as individuals in the frame of relationships and marriages.

Also, Richard is just the worst.

I do wish this book had a bit more to say, but I think that's my own problem as a reader. I'm always looking for social commentary when sometimes it's enough for a book just to be a book, and this one was that. It also suffered from being too long and might have even been split into a duology—I would have enjoyed a sequel and the opportunity it would have brought into exploring and revealing that last twist while alleviating the reader from the sheer length of this one! However, it was wildly entertaining and a wonderful character study. I'm so so excited to crack in to the other books written by this co-writing team!