The Other Wife

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The fact that I predicted all the twists in this book didn’t massively affect my enjoyment of the story and it was still a fast paced thriller that was hard to put down! Although slightly predictable, the twists were still done really well and suspense in this book was amazing, every scene felt so intense especially towards the end of the book.

Review: The Other Wife by Michael Robotham - Booktopia Review: The Other Wife by Michael Robotham - Booktopia

The beginning was a little depressing as the narrators were in dark places mentally. Each were grieving in their own way. However, not all is doom and gloom as lighter quips popped up at unexpected times. This one was a favorite: Those Russian women, they knew how to deal with the cold, and that was by throwing all sense of fashion out the window and essentially going out dressed as a bed”. It's multi-POV, third person, where the various POVs you get are all women entangled in deceitful marriages, or flirting with disaster, or investigating a mysterious death. It jumps around in time, but not too much or confusingly, and plays on a few favorite tropes: the creepy smart house, isolated in the woods (in a snowstorm, no less!), Gothic family histories, people who aren't what they seem. There are some unreliable narrators in this book, on more than one level. At the same time, as Gothically soapy as one or two turns are, the emotional arcs still feel grounded--the characters feel like real, whole people, and you easily get pulled into their emotional orbits and care about what happens to them. Much like in What You Did, I was tugged along on a very emotionally immediate read.

If the premise sounds far-fetched, I recall the tale told to me by a British friend who discovered that, like the fictional William, her father had also managed a parallel life. Absent half the year "on business", he had established another family in Australia where my friend had a much younger half-brother who she had never met. As always, even Robotham's most extraordinary stories have their basis in the kinds of things people really do.

The Other Wife (TV Mini Series 2012– ) - IMDb The Other Wife (TV Mini Series 2012– ) - IMDb

The fact is Richard was a scoundrel, unfortunately one that Eleanor spent her life with, but as Claire realises the time was not lost: both of the women were blessed with beautiful children, and I know they wouldn’t do their lives over because of those children. (An excellent message to readers that there can be good things born from adversity) Now, the good points. I loved how the author chose to parallel the women so similarly so that we could see just how this revelation affected each of them. I thought it was very interesting. I also really liked how each of them had such extreme impressions of the other but when they finally meet, they realise that everything they thought to be true was not. Born in Australia in November 1960, Michael Robotham grew up in small country towns that had more dogs than people and more flies than dogs. He escaped in 1979 and became a cadet journalist on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney. For the next fourteen years he wrote for newspapers and magazines in Australia, Britain and America. As a senior feature writer for the UK’s Mail on Sunday he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra, unearthed in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin’s Hitler files, which had been missing for nearly fifty years until a cleaner stumbled upon a cardboard box that had been misplaced and misfiled.

This was a pretty great thriller! While the relationship between the three main characters was fairly obvious to me from pretty early on, I still enjoyed the drama and suspense of it all and all the twists and turns! The strangeness doesn’t end there. This woman is covered in William’s blood, and is claiming that she found him at the bottom of the stairs in their house. Can she be trusted? Is she really William’s wife – or the one who hurt him? FOR THE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW I DID WITH THE AUTHOR, FOLLOW THIS LINK: http://twentythreeowls.blogspot.sg/20...

Michael Robotham’s Best Yet? Review of The Other Wife Michael Robotham’s Best Yet? Review of The Other Wife

And who is the strange woman crying at William's bedside, covered in his blood - a friend, a mistress, a fantasist or a killer? A free copy of this book was provided for reviewing purposes in conjunction with interviewing Kathleen for the release of her latest novel Secrets of the Royal Wedding Chapel. My review is honest, and has not been impacted by the free copy.Claire is an absolutely fantastic author. She had me on the edge of my seat, desperate to keep reading, not wanting to put the book down. There's little twists spreaded the whole way through, getting bigger until they lead to the main. I absolutely loved it. One never thinks they are going to wake up with to a dead husband, Eleanor most certainly did not. But it’s what comes after that is hardest to handle-her husband of 38 years had secretly changed his beneficiary on his life insurance to go to another woman-his other wife. News that would make the most understanding, most loving wife want to lose her head and perhaps look for revenge. Did I mention dead bodies? There are some. There’s also infidelity, manipulation, spying, and A LOT of lying. I mention this because one or more of these subjects could be triggers for some. This story is about two women married to the same man. One married to him for 38 years and the other for 4 years. Unfortuntely neither of them are aware of his double life which is only realised as he is found dead in a motel room in seedy circumstances. Now two women are in distress and disbelief. Characters shifted without an introduction and many times it was difficult to discern who was saying what.

The Other Wife by Claire McGowan | Goodreads The Other Wife by Claire McGowan | Goodreads

Told from the point of view of each woman, their plight pulls you in from the start, and continues to keep you engaged as they find their own paths through the devastation. These women feel like real people, not manufactured for fiction, and it would take a hard-hearted reader to not empathize with middle-aged Eleanor and thirty-something Claire. They are at such different stages of life - one with adult children, the other with youngsters barely past toddlerhood - which makes the similarities and differences of their challenges all the more engrossing.The gist of it is Suzi is beautiful, pregnant and married to a very jealous and controlling husband who sets the perimeters with cameras and spyware. She thinks she is smooth hiding a lot of secrets from him, but he knows her every secret. Does he know the baby may be someone else's? Their relationship is unhealthy and deceptive on both ends. The triggers are there for psychological abuse. His first novel The Suspect, a psychological thriller, was chosen by the world’s largest consortium of book clubs as only the fifth International Book of the Month, making it the top recommendation to 28 million book club members in fifteen countries. It has been translated into twenty-two languages, including some he’s barely heard of.