The Wife: A Review

Hi friends!

Thank you Netgalley for the chance to read and review The Wife by Shalini Boland prior to it's September release date. 

I swear, there has got to be so many thrillers with the word wife in the title. That seems to be a popular trope among mystery and thriller writers. 

This book was... predictable. We start off with our main character, Zoe's, wedding day to her husband Toby when she faints and loses her memory of what happened leading up to her "accident." We jump between then and now (10 years later) as Zoe struggles to remember her special day and desperately continues to search for her missing sister Dina. However, things are not always what they seem.

I feel like the crazy mother-in-law trope is overdone in the thriller genre. This book fell right into that trope. I won't tell you why she's crazy, because spoilers, but you'll soon find out.

I was intrigued by this book (it's only 292 pages) and quickly entranced. As the story went on though, the twists became pretty predictable and the ending was not that surprising. I expected something of that sort to have occurred so the element of surprise was not there. The plot was still pretty effed up but I wish it had been less predictable.

And shout out to Zoe's blundering father who sweeps in and saves the day. I feel like that's another common theme in thrillers, but that could just be my imagination?

I definitely didn't hate this story, and I may try to read another of Boland's books to see if she is predictable in all her stories, but I didn't love this. I felt like it was a mediocre thriller that really could have been much better than it was and had a lot more potential that was just ignored. 

The epilogue was great and left the reader wondering what was going to happen next. It was left as an open-ending for you to draw your own conclusions, which I actually liked because it gave me free range. It didn't leave me feeling as if I could predict exactly what that character would do.

Overall I would give this three stars.