Book Review: THE HUSBAND'S SECRET

Title: The Husband's Secret

Author: Liane Moriarty

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 432

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

One Monday, Cecelia Fitzpatrick finds an old letter written by her husband, John-Paul, with the message, ‘To be opened only in the event of my death’. At first, Cecelia dismisses the letter, considering it unimportant. When she tells her husband what she found, he tells her that it’s some sentimental stuff, and would she please not read it?

Cecelia’s life is perfect; her good-looking husband, her perfect daughters, Isabel, Esther and Polly, and her flourishing Tupperware business. When she finally reads the letter, it will upend her perfect life.

In Melbourne, Tess O’Leary, her husband, Will, and cousin, Felicity, run a successful communications business. Life is good, until Will and Felicity inform Tess that they have fallen in love. Now Tess is moving back to Sydney with her six-year-old son, Liam.

Rachel Crowley, grandmother to little Jacob, has her life upended once more when son Rob and daughter-in-law Lauren announce that they and Jacob are moving to New York, where Lauren has secured a fancy job. Rachel, already suffering as the anniversary of her daughter’s murder approaches, is heartbroken. Over two decades ago, her daughter Janie was murdered in a park. The murderer was never arrested.

In Sydney, Tess falls in love with ex-boyfriend Connor Whitby, now the PE teacher at the local school. Rachel suspects Connor of being her daughter’s murderer. Since the police won’t act on her suspicions, she figures she will. 

 

The three subplots are vaguely connected. For some reason, all the families like watching The Biggest Loser, a reality show where the contestant that loses weight the most wins. The concept of the biggest loser loosely applies to all three women, and literally to Felicity, once obese, who loses a lot of weight, and supposedly ends up beautiful. Loser and winner combined.

This was my first read by this author. The story is written in the omniscient past tense PoV. It is almost stream of consciousness in the amount of detail we get about each life. Detail that we could have done without. There are frequent digressions as the characters think aloud. Considering the amount of time we spend in the heads of the three main characters, Cecelia, Tess and Rachel, I still didn’t like any of them.

The book takes much too long to get going. It was only on page 147 of 406, nearly 36 percent in, that we get the first hint of something not being right.

Cecelia reads her husband’s letter, but not before many chapters and many pages have gone by. While the contents of the letter are explosive, all hell does not break loose. The book slowly meanders towards its conclusion.

In the very first chapter, we are told about Cecelia’s friends, Miriam Openheimer, Erica Edgecliff, Laura Marks, Sarah Sacks and Mahalia Ramachandran, the latter to tick the diversity box. None of these ladies, except Miriam only briefly, are mentioned thereafter. Why did we need to know the names and brief bios of each of these friends if they had no role to play in the book?

A line about the Berlin Wall that stood out for me: The Wall was like the giant carcass of a dragon that had once terrorized the city and the tourists were crows pecking away at its remains.

Some questions remained unanswered. Tess doesn’t know it, but the author lets us know, in a mysterious scene, that her parents’ divorce was something her mother had initiated. We never learn why.

The story begins on a Monday in Holy Week, when Christians commemorate the events leading up to Christ’s death and resurrection, and ends on Easter Sunday. The time period is not significant of itself, but merely relates to the fact that all the characters are either practicing Catholics or lapsed.

The main characters were supposed to be Catholics, but they celebrated, yes, celebrated, Maundy Thursday with an Easter hat parade, something no practicing Catholic would do, but the whole parish was at it here.

On Good Friday, they are all out flying kites, enjoying the holiday. Is this how Catholics in Australia mark what is the most solemn period in the calendar of the Catholic church? Or are the characters Catholics only so the author can play with themes of guilt, regret and redemption that Catholics are supposed to be weighed by?

Book Review: THE MURDERESS

Title: The Murderess

Author: Laurie Notaro

Publisher: Little A

Pages: 367

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

When two stinking trunks make their way to Union station, the porters have no idea what they contain. Only that they are bleeding and that the stench is overpowering. Mrs Ruth Judd claims that the trunks contain books belonging to her husband, Dr Judd. But she doesn’t have the key to the trunks. When the trunks are opened, they are found to contain the bodies of Agnes Anne LeRoi and Hedvig (Sammy) Samuelson. Now Ruth is on the run, declared a fugitive and wanted for the murders of the two women.

But who is Ruth? Married to a much older man, who she addresses as Doctor throughout their marriage, Ruth is swept into an affair with Jack Halloran, the neighbour of the Fords, in whose household she serves as a nanny. At the same time, she befriends Anne and Sammy, and the three women help each other through challenges.

But as the heat rises in Phoenix, Arizona, we see passions get inflamed, until the time comes when confrontation becomes inevitable, leaving the police to probe the question of how Ruth came to be responsible for the murders of two of her closest friends who she loved?

 

The greater part of the book is set around the late 1920s and 1930s. the past tense omniscient narrative is interspersed with newspaper stories and Ruth’s first person past tense account. Ruth’s account takes us back to 1923, when she is a young girl, slowly leading up to the present.

 

I was drawn to the book from the very first paragraph when the trunks are found. Soon we meet Ruth and know that she is responsible for this. The mystery lies in why she killed her two dearest friends. What follows is an intense story of passion and intrigue, as the police attempt to piece together the puzzle. This is the early 1930s, so a lot of the forensic technology and techniques available today are not in place.

The period comes with its own challenges, when tuberculosis could kill you. We learn about the challenges that Ruth faces, her tuberculosis, her husband’s opioid addiction, her loneliness, among other things. We learn also about the circumstances that people faced in that time, with the Depression looming large, the challenges faced by single women, the outlawing of homosexuality. In 1927, Ruth says, “people were still spending money like mad then,” reminding us that the Great Depression is still in the future.

The weather in Phoenix is as powerful as a character, influencing and driving Ruth on. The weather, combined with her loneliness, her struggle between choosing her own happiness with Jack and worrying about her lack of faithfulness to her husband (she is, after all, a pastor’s daughter), her dependence on substances to tackle the challenges she faces and her failing mental health (the illness runs in the family; her mother is eventually institutionalized too), all egg her on to make dubious choices.

 

 

The author pulls off the unimaginable, helping us to see the murderess as a flawed human. Despite the gory nature of the crime, the author treats it in a manner that is neither prurient nor base. I couldn’t help feeling an inexplicable feeling of compassion for Ruth as she slowly loses her mind. Ruth herself describes it as a ‘wire running through her.’

The crime may inspire revulsion, but Ruth’s story demands attention. Through flashbacks, we get to know how Ruth, Anne and Sammy become friends. We see the exact moment at which the situation changes for Ruth, hurtling her and the others to their inevitable fate.

Ultimately, the Murderess is one of us, like us. The book reminds us, as it did the staff at the matrons in the prison, how close we may be to having our own wires stretched too taut. It reminds us that there is a very thin line between mental health and mental illness. 

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)