I’ve been reading more Women’s Fiction lately as my own writing takes that turn, and was intrigued by the premise of this psychological thriller featuring a divorce attorney in her 60s who’s faced with escalating crises. Olivia Sinclair wakes up happy on her birthday, after making love with her handsome, “perfect” husband Richard, also an attorney. Then she immediately smacks into shocking proof that Richard is a serial philanderer who’s been having affairs with young women for their entire marriage. When his latest young lover is found murdered, Olivia is arrested and must find the truth to free herself.
The strength of the novel is, first, in the rendering of Olivia’s emotional devastation as she realizes that everything she built her life around for decades of marriage was a deception. Second is the urgent pacing that pulled me along to read the next development in the setup of Olivia to take a big fall. I feel that a lot of women will relate to the exploration of emotional betrayal, and to the feeling of powerlessness of becoming a cog in an impersonal system of “justice.”
Where the novel fell down for me was in too many improbabilities, especially regarding Olivia’s naïve reactions to Richard and to the legal system. She is a successful attorney who is expert in sussing out infidelities in other marriages, but hasn’t a clue about her own husband. And when she’s arrested, she plays a helpless victim for too long, and doesn’t seem to understand her own legal rights. Those issues and some other plot holes left me feeling that perhaps a stronger editorial hand could have been helpful here.