My Lovely Wife – #Review & Blog Tour #mylovelywife @berkleypub

Synopsis from Penguin Random House:

Dexter meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this wildly compulsive debut thriller about a couple whose fifteen-year marriage has finally gotten too interesting…

Our love story is simple. I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams, and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored.

We look like a normal couple. We’re your neighbors, the parents of your kid’s friend, the acquaintances you keep meaning to get dinner with.

We all have our secrets to keeping a marriage alive.

Ours just happens to be getting away with murder.

About: My Lovely Wife is a thriller written by Samantha Downing. It was recently published on 3/26/2019 by Berkley Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House, hardcover, 384 pages. The genres are mystery, thriller, and fiction. This book is the author’s debut. According to Berkley’s website, “Our expertise in women’s fiction, romance, science fiction/fantasy, and mystery/suspense makes us uniquely suited to introduce a new generation of popular novelists and to reinvigorate the publishing programs for established bestselling authors.” Please see below for more information about the author and publisher.

My Experience: I started reading My Lovely Wife on 4/10/2019 and finished it on 4/15/2019 at 12:10am. This book is a fantastic read! I like that this thriller has a new angle, focusing on family and how serial killers affect their children. It’s definitely interesting when killers are portrayed as family people instead of a loner because it’s harder to distinguish that they do bad things when they look so normal. I like the narrator, especially his relationship with his children.

This book is told in the first person point of view following a man pretending to be deaf and called himself Tobias. He went into a bar and left with a woman he just met for a one-night stand. Then he came home to his wife, Millicent and children, Rory and Jenna. His wife asked him if he found the one and he said no even though she was. Then he went out to scout a new woman. The story slowly reveals the wife’s intentions and what they do together as their extracurricular activities. The wife appeared to have secrets even the husband doesn’t know and then the husband also keeps secrets from his wife that his clever son found out and used it to blackmail him. The story sprinkled bits of their past over different chapters, how he first met his wife and how things started happening.

My Lovely Wife is very well written and a fast paced read. like how secrets are slowly being revealed. Readers know as much as the narrator, which is not much at times because he afraid to ask the details from his wife. I do like that he does his own research to gain some knowledge when his wife doesn’t volunteer the information. The wife is a mystery until the end, though she seems to be a good mom focusing on eating healthy organic foods and taking away her children’s computer at night to keep them safe from predators online. The family aspects is good but at the same time lacks the thrill in a thriller for me. I still like their family routine and I do recommend everyone to read this book!

Pro: fast paced, page turner, family, lies, secrets,

Con: lacking the thrills

I rate it 4.5 stars!

Buy it here for free shipping: Book Depository or Penguin’s website

About the Author:

Samantha Downing currently lives in New Orleans, where she is furiously typing away on her next thrilling standalone. My Lovely Wife is her first novel. (Photo obtained from Goodreads and info obtained from Penguin’s website).

More information about Berkley:

Website: http://www.penguin.com/publishers/berkley | Twitter: https://twitter.com/BerkleyPub | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BerkleyPub | Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/BerkleyPub

***Disclaimer: Many thanks to Berkley Publishing for inviting me to host a blog tour. I appreciate the opportunity to read and review. Please be assured that my opinions are honest.

xoxo,
Jasmine