Story for the Week
I am a second wife. My husband is my first (and only) husband, but I am his second wife.
There’s a definite stigma to being a second wife, but you never hear stories about an evil stepdad, do you? I think I hit the jackpot, though, in the step-family department. When my husband and I got married, his daughter was almost 17. We lived in different states (and now live clear across the country), so we don’t have a lot of opportunities to spend time together. We’ve had to work at developing a relationship long-distance, but we make a point of keeping in touch on social media and over the phone. I adore her and her family and wish we lived closer together, and I am grateful every day for the extended family.
My husband likes to say that his ex and I are best friends. We definitely have a great friendship. When I was pregnant with our daughter, my husband’s ex was almost more excited than I was. As my due date got closer, she called every week to check on us and then every day to see if anything was happening. One afternoon when we were out shopping, we came home to a very excited message on the answering machine: “Oh my God, you’re having the baby!!!” It went on for a couple of minutes, just repeating the same thing over and over. We weren’t having the baby lol. We were just buying groceries, but it was nice to hear the excitement.
I love the people that my husband’s previous marriage brought into my life. I get to be a not-evil stepmom. I have a great friendship I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Our daughter has a sibling and a brother-in-law and a nephew that she never would have had because I was pretty ancient when I had her. And I have a daughter-in-law, a son-in-law, and a grandson that I might not have had because I was pretty old when I got married too. 😉
I am glad I’m the second wife in my life as opposed to the one in this book I read a couple of months ago.
Book Review
⭐⭐½
2.5 Stars for The New Husband by D.J. Palmer
379 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: April 14, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press.
Publisher’s Description
Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you know them.
Nina Garrity learned that the hard way after discovering that her missing husband, Glen, had been leading a double life with another woman. But Glen’s gone—presumably drowned while fishing on his boat—so she can’t confront him about the affair or any of his other misdeeds. A year and a half after the accident, Nina considers herself a widow, even though the police never found a body. Following a chance encounter with Simon Fitch, a teacher from her daughter Maggie’s middle school, Nina finds love again and has hopes of putting her shattered life back together.
Simon, a widower still grieving the suicide of his first wife, has found his dream girl in Nina. His charm and affections help break through to a heart hardened by betrayal. Nina’s teenage son, Connor, embraces Simon as the father he wishes his dad could have been, but Maggie sees a far darker side to this new man in their lives. Even Nina’s good friends wonder if Simon is supremely devoted—or dangerously possessive.
But Nina is committed, not only to her soon-to-be new husband but also to resuming her former career as a social worker. Before she can move forward, however, Nina must first clear her conscience that she’s not making another terrible choice in a man. In doing so, she will uncover the shocking truth: the greatest danger to her, and her children, are the lies people tell themselves.
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The New Husband is the first book I read by D.J. Palmer, and I’m undecided on whether I will read more. I gave this one 2.5 stars (which rounds up to 3). I am sure some readers will love it, as demonstrated by some of the other reviews I saw, but I had really mixed feelings.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
Let’s start with what I did like. This felt like a new take on an old topic for thrillers. I’ve read so many novels that start with someone missing, presumed dead, and the book (or movie for that matter) solves the mystery along the way. The difference here is that the book started with the presumed-dead husband, but the wife had already moved on and the book really isn’t about what happened to the husband at the start. It’s about who the wife had chosen to move on with.
In this case, Nina was no longer mourning her “dead” husband Glen. She had fallen in love with Simon and had just moved in with him. Some thought it was too soon a year and a half after her husband’s death/disappearance, but you can’t put a timeframe on fate, right? I was intrigued for sure, and that’s what kept me reading.
Where the book fell down for me was that the author gave away too much too soon, which kind of ruined the thrill aspect. I knew from the very first chapter that Glen wasn’t dead (it was too obvious), and in chapter 8 (13% into the book), I had figured out that Simon had something to do with Glen’s disappearance and that his appearance in Nina’s life was no happy accident. It was obvious when Simon started pressuring Nina to change her hair to mimic a model in a magazine that he wanted her to look like someone from his past, and I suspected it was his first wife.
There were so many red flags that he wasn’t who he pretended to be. Nina—the licensed social worker—didn’t notice them, constantly making excuses for things that seemed off at first, but her middle-school daughter knew that something was wrong? Not very believable. And of course, I was right. I knew all of it before it happened. Even to the point where I knew at the end of the book that, when Nina went to Simon’s lake house to look for her missing dog, she was going to linger too long, she was going to find Glen hidden in the secret room in Simon’s basement, and Simon was going to get there and trap them both. Of course, the police detective who came to check things out didn’t have backup and ended up getting killed, and Nina had to power through and save the day. The idea was intriguing, but the execution was cliché.
Now for the writing style itself. First and foremost, I just wasn’t crazy about the author’s “voice,” for lack of a better description. It didn’t sound like a person really talks and felt like the author was trying too hard. Then there were the points of view for each chapter. Another reviewer mentioned this as well. The chapters rotate—Nina, Maggie (the daughter), Simon, Glen—but Maggie’s chapters were all in the first person.
I also would have preferred if the chapter breaks indicated whose point of view we were in as the chapter title. Chapter 1 would have actually been a prologue since it’s 17 months before the rest of the book, but then Chapter 2: Nina, Chapter 3: Nina, Chapter 4: Nina, Chapter 5: Maggie, etc. And the book has an Epilogue of Maggie’s college essay (so YEARS later). Maybe this was why Maggie’s chapters were in the first person, because her essay would be in the first person, but I found the whole chapter to be preachy and irrelevant, so it really wasn’t necessary to make her chapters first-person point of view.
There were also number of elements that would require a pretty substantial rewrite.
Chapter 1 started with Anthony Strauss finding Glen’s abandoned boat with blood all over the deck and the dog barking at something on the shoreline. We had no idea who Anthony was, and he never appeared anywhere else in the book. If he was so non-essential, the police should have found the boat, or Nina, or one of the kids, someone who had standing in the story. As I mentioned, the boat was covered in blood, but the police never found a body, so they assume Glen drowned?
“The deck was covered in deep red. How odd, Anthony thought, until his mind clicked over. A gasp rose in his throat as a sickening realization set in. Anthony had gutted plenty of fish in his day, but none had ever bled like that.”
And Nina told her therapist later that they ALL thought Glen had drowned. Umm…how was a blood-covered boat NOT a suspected murder scene?
Simon had two previous wives (not one, as indicated in the description). Allison ran off and was never heard from again, and Emma committed suicide. We heard a lot about Allison, but no one ever finds out where she went or what happened to her. Since she’s the start of Simon’s story, I think it’s pretty important that Nina find her during the course of this book. And at one point while she was in Simon’s lake house, Nina saw three photos in on the wall, all looking eerily similar. She identified her own photo and Emma’s, but she looked at the first photo and whispered “Who are you?” WHAT?! Nina had talked to her therapist about Allison! She knew about Allison! (I suspect it’s possible that the original storyline only had one ex-wife, based on the description, and the second ex was added, but then the book needs some serious editing.)
Finally, while Nina, Simon, and Glen were all in the secret room where Glen was held captive, Simon told Nina about $200,000 in cash in the closet upstairs. It was Emma’s money, and thanks to her will, now it was Simon’s money, and they could take it and run away together.
Once Nina killed Simon and Glen was on the mend in the hospital, Glen and Nina were talking about what they were going to do, and Nina said they would rebuild. Glen wanted to know how because he didn’t have a job, and up until very recently, Simon had provided for Nina (she had just gone back to work as a social worker because she didn’t want to rely on anyone else to support her family, so she really didn’t have anything.) Nina smiled and told Glen that when she went upstairs to call the police, she looked for the money in the closet and put it in her car. Glen told her she was a clever girl, and Nina said they “deserved” the money.
She planned to fund drug treatment in Emma’s brother’s name (he died of a drug overdose), provide for the police detective’s widow, and fund an effort to find Allison. Considering that she and Glen had no money to speak of, they expected that $200K to go pretty far. But despite the fact that she had charitable plans for some of the money, just the fact that she took it because they deserve it and Glen went with it, in my opinion, made them both instantly unsympathetic.
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