Pretty Little Wife by Darby Kane
Suspense
12/29/2020 by William Morrow
Review by Melinda
My second most-read genre is suspense or thrillers after romance but I generally only read those written by women because I got tired of reading violence against women written by men. A delightful micro-subgenre (totally making this up here lol) is thrillers written by romance authors. We have Victoria Dahl writing as Victoria Helen Stone, Nalini Singh, and now HelenKaye Dimon writing as Darby Kane. Romance writers know what makes plots move forward and what keeps readers on their toes so to me, this just makes sense.
I found this book really suspenseful and filled with messy characters, which is exactly the kind of thing I like in both romance and suspense. Lila discovers her husband is trash so she kills him, and sets the scene perfectly for someone to find the body…but the body is gone. From there I pretty much couldn’t tell anything that was going to happen and I was surprised at every turn. My favorite piece that was included was that there’s a podcast happening at the same time as this because there are other disappearances that have happened in the area over the last few years. That felt like such an interesting and fun thing to include.
I judge suspense books differently than romance obviously – there’s no HEA here in that there’s no two (or more) characters living happily ever after here. But I judge suspense based on if the plot feels complete and if I’m satisfied by the ending and if enough of the threads are wrapped up. In Pretty Little Wife I was super surprised at the ending and more than satisfied. Darby Kane definitely has a future in this genre!
Grade A –
I love it when romance writers try writing in a different genre (the only downside is that sometimes they don’t come back to writing romances). After all, when a writer knows how hard it is to get a couple to their HEA, it follows that they would also have a pretty good idea about all the things that can go wrong on that journey. Do you like Julianna Keyes? She wrote TIME SERVED, one of my all-time favorite romances, and two very good baseball romances, TEAM PLAYER and BENCH PLAYER. Anyway, this year she published a mystery, ALL THE MISSING PIECES, as Julianna Keyes, and has recently announced she will be publishing suspense as Elaine Murphy.
I love Julianna Keyes! And actually, I just got the mystery as a gift and heard about the suspense. I’ll definitely be reading those too. I just think romance authors have to know so much about plotting so it’s natural they’d be good at different genres!