In between dodging the weather and finally finishing those bonsai shelves, I managed to finish reading another brilliant book, The Fake Wife by Sharon Bolton.
You’re not who you say you are. But neither is she.
Olive Anderson has accepted that tonight she’ll be dining alone, without her husband. So when a beautiful stranger appears at Olive’s dinner table, telling the waiter she’s her wife, Olive is immediately unsettled.
But the stranger wants to talk, and isn’t this what Olive wants on this lonely winter night? To vent to a perfect stranger? She’s too ashamed to tell her real friends the truth – six months into the marriage they all warned her against, her life is a living nightmare.
Perhaps Olive should have asked the fake wife who she’s really married to. Perhaps she should have known this chance encounter had something to do with her secretive husband. Because there is a string of missing women connected to Mr Anderson, and by the morning, Olive will be the latest…
The Fake Wife is an unputdownable thriller that will shock and surprise you like the best television boxsets. If you enjoyed Netflix shows like Behind Her Eyes, The Stranger and Obsession you will love The Fake Wife.
Excerpt from The Fake Wife
… She waited for the woman to ask her what she did, to seek details, the customary dance of strangers. Except they weren’t strangers, not in this odd game she’d been invited to play. They were married. ‘How about you,’ she asked, before adding a tentative, ‘darling,’ for good measure. It sounded odd and forced on her tongue. Her new companion was better at this than she. That companion sighed, even managed to look bored. ‘Hartlepool’s a month behind, usual trouble with the lads at Darlington.
On the other hand, they passed the health and safety inspection.’ She was in construction, a surveyor or site manager. Assuming, of course, that she was telling the truth. ‘The llamas got out again,’ she went on. ‘I’m going to have to talk to Jim about putting a taller fence up.’ Maybe this whole evening was to be played out in some odd fantasy land. Perhaps Olive herself should pretend to be a brain surgeon or an astronaut, because if you were going to play the game, you might as well play it properly.
A picture flashed into her head: Michael in the study at home, working his way through an endless list of constituency emails, grimacing when a noisy quarrel erupted elsewhere in the house, checking Find My Friends to make sure she’d arrived safely, worried about her being away in such awful weather. One of Michael’s pet subjects was the dangers of northern winters.
What on earth was she doing playing games?
what indeed?
Our Review
This was such an unusual and very welcome beginning to this story, instantly igniting my curiosity.
The Fake Wife is a complicated, intriguing story that kept me hooked until the very last page.
I should add that it is beautifully written, drawing you in so completely that you feel every characters emotions. The intensity builds up very quickly, so much so that I had to take small breaks to literally get my breath back!
what shall I read next?
Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes 
Leave a Reply