Title: The Wife You Know
Author: Chad Zunker
Publisher: Thomas and Mercer
Pages: 207
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐
Luke and Ashley have not been married long, yet Luke loves his wife and
his three-year-old stepdaughter, Joy, as if she were his own. They are happy
until a video of Ashley breaking into a burning school building to save some
preschoolers trapped inside a room goes viral.
Ashley disappears, taking her daughter, leaving no information for Luke
on where she has gone or why. Determined to get answers, Luke launches his own
investigation to seek answers to his questions.
What danger does Ashley fear? Will he ever see his family again?
The book is written in the first person past tense PoV of Luke Driskell.
In the first few chapters, Luke went all hard-sell on Ashley, painting a
picture of a kind, young woman, whose was all heart. But it was all Too Much
Information, and it did nothing to endear her to me.
Luke, on the other hand, came across as a easygoing and nice person. Of
course, I could have done without the flashbacks to his childhood.
I found it distasteful how, at one point, during his investigations,
Luke introduces himself to an old landlady of Ashley’s as her brother. Couldn’t
he have said best friend instead?
Again he goes on to tell her that he is estranged from his sister, then
a few minutes later, offers to show the landlady pictures of his supposed
niece. How did he get those pictures if the two ‘siblings’ are estranged from
each other?
The story needed tighter editing. The flashbacks were detailed and
mostly unrequired. I was interested in the story only so far as it concerned
Luke. Ashley inspired no positive feeling in me. I didn’t care about her at
all.
There should have been more scenes with the child to give us an
opportunity to see Ashley as a mother, and generally more scenes with Ashley as
well.
Luke’s detailed descriptions
of his deprived childhood, the manner in which he proposed to Ashley, their
dates, none of them were relevant to the story. The story lay in the present,
and yet the author persisted in telling us far too much about the past.
Instead there should have
been more scenes from Ashley’s point of view. The big reveal couldn’t hold my
interest. Nor were the twists and turns exciting enough. I did feel that she
could have taken him into confidence.
This one was a quick read,
but not a memorable one.
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