The Replacement Wife by Darby Kane

I would like to thank Anne from Random Things Tours and HarperCollins for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – HarperCollins

Published – Out Now

Price – £9.99 paperback £6.99 Kindle eBook

Elisa Wright is a mom and wife, living a nice, quiet life in a nice, quiet town. She’s also convinced her brother-in-law is a murderer. Josh has one dead wife and one missing fiancée, and though he grieved for them he starts dating someone new. Elisa fears for that woman’s safety, and she desperately wants to know what happened to her friend, Josh’s missing fiancée.

Searching for clues means investigating her own family. And she doesn’t like what she finds. A laptop filled with incriminating information. Other women.

But when Elisa becomes friends with Josh’s new girlfriend and starts to question things she thinks are true, Elisa wonders if the memories of a horrible incident a year ago have finally pushed her over the edge and Josh is really innocent. With so much at stake, Elisa fights off panic attacks and a strange illness. Is it a breakdown or something more? The race is on to get to the truth before another disappearance because there’s a killer in the family…or is there?

Families are tricky alliances. Some through being blood relations and through relationships. Each has their own history, friendships and disputes to navigate. It is very hard to have a feud with just one relative though and it is amazing how many people can give one person (especially if they’re male) the benefit of the doubt time after time. In Darby Kane’s addictive thriller, The Replacement Wife we follow one woman who realises that her brother-in-law is less unlucky in love and increasingly more likely to have a violent side to any wo man he feels no longer meets his needs.

Elisa Wright has had a torrid year of grief, pain, and stress. Among the things that have hot her hard is the loss of her friend Abby who also was her brother-in-law Josh’s girlfriend. Abby mysteriously vanished without a trace leaving all her belongings behind. What starts to make Elisa suspicious is that Josh’s first wife has strangely died in a bizarre accident. Finding Abby’s old laptop Elisa stumbles across some messages to Abby suggesting the first death was not accidental and that Abby was in danger. Elisa starts to delve in Josh’s past; someone who she has always known has a bad temper and a childish need for attention; but Elisa now starts to see he has other secrets. A final alarm is sounded when with little notice she finds he has another girlfriend to present to the family the mysterious Rachel. While members of the family think Elisa is experiencing a return of mental health issues Elisa herself is worried that Rachel is now in danger but she too may now be getting played with in a dangerous game.

What I loved about his thriller is that it very much felt a rollercoaster of surprises. Josh looks and sounds so normal that as we find out what Elisa is aware of and tart to unwrap Josh’s history that we see some worrying signs that he is very dangerous. The tension is though that he is family. Elisa’s husband Harris is very loyal to his younger brother and can only see an immature man and not someone who could be violent and cruel. This is a tale with a fascinating glimpse at how some men in particular don’t put clues together in the same way as their partners and seem oblivious to how such bad behaviour could eventually hurt or kill partners of their friends and loved ones.

Kane slowly dishes out surprise and surprise about Josh’s past and how far things have been brushed over. We find further secrets about the time of Abby’s disappearance and his relationships with other women. He is a fascinating creepy figure that can turn the charm on to Elisa’s husband and young son so much that his behaviour gets glossed over and Elisa gets the blame for being disruptive. One additional element to add more danger is that we find someone appears to be playing games with Elisa – messages she didn’t send and personal items moving around. Is this her mental health having a relapse or someone wanting to make Elisa feel discredited?

We soon get a web of tricks and lies created around Elisa and what I was impressed with was her determination despite all the blame and sense of rising stress she would still try to do the right thing for her missing friend. You can feel the thin ice creak as she pushes what she can do and by the end we worry she has got herself in a far too dangerous place to escape. Kane very smartly takes us on the journey feeling Elisa’s increasing mix of isolation within her own family and yet determination not to give in to a cruel man who wants to show her as weak and crazy. My only reservation in the final scenes is it tries to explain everything left unclear in just a couple of short chapters, and I think by then allowing a little more breathing of the story would have been absolutely fine

This is an empowering thriller tackling a difficult subject sensitively but still delivers a fast-paced story where the constant surprises and reactions all feel natural and add to an atmosphere of danger and threat to our main character. It was ultimately a very good read. A thriller writer I will be keeping my eyes out for more from in the future!