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Pretty Little Wife by Darby Kane

Thriller

Pretty Little Wife

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Darby Kane, on your first book!

Early Release

This is an early release that's only available to our members—the rest of the world has to wait to read it.

by Darby Kane

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Volume 0
Volume 0

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Yes, she’s embroidered.

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Quick take

Till death do us part gets a whole new meaning in this twisted domestic suspense about a dead husband gone missing.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Fast_Read

    Fast read

  • Illustrated icon, 400

    400+ pages

  • Illustrated icon, Creepy

    Creepy

  • Illustrated icon, Marriage_Issues

    Marriage issues

Synopsis

Lila Ridgefield lives in an idyllic college town, but not everything is what it seems. Lila isn’t what she seems. A student vanished months ago. Now, Lila’s husband, Aaron, is also missing. At first these cases are treated as horrible coincidences until it’s discovered the student is really the third of three unexplained disappearances over the last few years. The police are desperate to find the connection, if there even is one. Little do they know they might be stumbling over only part of the truth….

With the small town in an uproar, everyone is worried about the whereabouts of their beloved high school teacher. Everyone except Lila, his wife. She’s definitely confused about her missing husband but only because she was the last person to see his body, and now it’s gone.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Pretty Little Wife.

Pretty Little Wife

Chapter One

A monster.

She missed the signs before. Maybe ignored them without fully realizing it. Now she couldn’t unsee them.

Adrenaline raced through her as she tore their bedroom apart. Overturned the laundry basket and scattered the contents. Shoved the bed, banging her shin on the metal bed frame before pushing the mattress to check underneath. Crawled on her knees across the floor, ignoring the shooting pain as bone struck hardwood. She even checked behind the heavy curtains he insisted they use because light in the morning gave him a headache.

The revulsion festering inside her, carefully tucked away for years so as not to spill over and contaminate their tenuous peace, exploded. A wave of scalding heat ran through her, poisoning and erasing every good memory.

The stupid blackout curtains. She’d searched for weeks for the combination of the right color and the perfect dark liner he’d barked at her to find. Never mind that she preferred waking up to the light pouring in or that the heavy material gave the room a suffocating sense of darkness.

His rules and his needs.

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Why I love it

I budgeted two weeks to read Pretty Little Wife, which is funny because I devoured it in two days. I don’t want to say too much but this book has it all, including a protagonist who is keeping secrets and characters who all—for some reason or another—fall under suspicion, and maybe not even for the murder. We (may) already know who did that.

Lila Ridgefield isn’t who she says she is, but that doesn’t make her unreliable. It means she hasn’t told us all of her secrets yet. But one secret we know right away: Lila killed her husband Aaron, setting it up to look like a suicide. Much to her surprise, his body immediately goes missing. Did Aaron really die? If so, then who moved him? Suddenly, all hell has broken loose.

This is the type of thriller I love the most: A taut domestic suspense with just a shade of police procedural woven in. There are so many layers and so many questions about marriage, shame, and the power dynamics that animate our most dysfunctional relationships. Through it all, Pretty Little Wife asks: How far would you go to right a wrong?

Member ratings (32,186)

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View all
The Boyfriend
The Last One at the Wedding
Sleep Tight
First Lie Wins
House of Glass
Middle of the Night
Listen for the Lie
A Talent for Murder
Beautiful Ugly
Someone in the Attic
One Perfect Couple
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Kill for Me, Kill for You
Bad Tourists
Murder Road
Daughter of Mine
The Fury
The Other Mothers
When I’m Dead
The Soulmate
What Lies in the Woods
She Started It
The Only One Left
Dark Corners
Blacktop Wasteland
All the Dangerous Things
The Only Survivors
The Broken Girls
The Family Game
The Push
We Were Never Here
Things We Do in the Dark
The Golden Couple
The Stranger Upstairs
Gone Tonight
Too Good to Be True
The Last Word
You Are Not Alone
Rock Paper Scissors
Not a Happy Family
A Flicker in the Dark
Reckless Girls
The House Across the Lake
The Last Thing He Told Me
The Maidens
Everything We Didn't Say
The Paris Apartment
You're Invited
The Last Party
Dark Places
Pieces of Her
The Wife Between Us
Sharp Objects
None of This Is True
The Silent Patient
The Other Woman
Necessary People
The Family Upstairs
The Night Swim
Girl A
The Hunting Wives
Just Another Missing Person
First Born
The Lies I Tell
Breathless