Christina Loeffler's Reviews > The Wife

3, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad, known as the Special Victims Unit stars!!!! *cue music*

They say opposites attract, right? Well, that couldn't be more true for Angela and Jason Powell. Jason is a tenured professor at NYU (with the coveted chili pepper next to his name on Rate My Professor), he's got a successful consulting firm, a best selling book and a beloved podcast - he's a man's man around town. On top of all of his successes he has a beautiful wife (Angela) and a spunky, smart 13 year old son (Spencer).

Angela, is a dutiful wife and mother. With a sordid past, she is uninterested in the lime-light and is reserved to almost an extreme. Her motto and goal in life is routine, so that she can live a "good and boring" day-to-day. While the first few years of their marriage were quiet and content, Jason's newfound fame is bringing unwanted attention to Angela and the past she has worked to keep hidden from the world.

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

Enter: cluster-fuckery. Jason is accused by two prominent women of sexual assault and rape. Angela and her family are thrust once again into center stage, only this time it isn't full of praise. As Angela wades through the questions of whether or not Jason is innocent, how to hide her past and deal with her son viewing his father in this new light, things slowwwwwly devolve into mayhem once we find out one of these women - Kerry Lynch, has abruptly gone missing.

This is told from alternating POVs between Angela and the lead detective on the case Corinne Duncan. Interspersed with these POVs we're given emails between Jason and his attorney as well as court documents and evidentiary examinations. A lot of this book felt like an episode of Law and Order: SVU, which I would've loved (because, Benson + Stabler 5ever) if it hadn't been well overplayed.

The public's first instinct is to disbelieve the woman because we don't want to admit these horrible things actually happen. So to counter that instinct, we good feminists take the position that we believe every single woman every single time.

This is a timely book, especially given the #metoo movement and the allusions to this were handled deftly and not overwhelming. The Wife raised some great questions about where we draw lines for innocence and understanding. When does one's past excuse their future actions, if ever? How do we condemn one person, while forgiving another given their circumstances? It makes for excellent discussion but it got a little too caught up in it for my personal taste.

The pacing of this novel was achingly slow for me. There was so much wasted time on police procedural drama that in the end didn't particularly affect the outcome. I think this came from an effort to mislead the reader as the police were being mislead but it fell short for me here. I think if Burke had cut down on that a bit this would've been a more well rounded read.

Admit it. When you hear about a missing kid, or a murdered woman, you scour the article for clues. Not clues about the perpetrator. No, we search for clues about what makes that woman or child different from the women and children we know and love.

What I will give The Wife is that the last quarter of the book was Grade-A crazy pants. As I've mentioned before, I'm really a garbage detective and I was patting myself on the back because I felt I had it all figured out. While I did guess some of the low-hanging fruit, there's no way to anticipate the magnitude of the implosion that happens at the end.

I completed this as a Traveling Friends read and as mentioned, the discussion was wonderful. It's a great little mystery and if police procedurals are your thing, this is is going to be right up your alley! I can see why so many enjoyed this, it was just a bit too slow for me.