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The English Wife by Lauren Willig

Mystery

The English Wife

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by Lauren Willig

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Quick take

It’s a bonbon of a book in the best way; every page feels like a secret indulgence, best read alone, curled up while wearing your most luxurious pajamas.

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author, Lauren Willig, comes this scandalous novel set in the Gilded Age, full of family secrets, affairs, and even murder.

Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life in New York: he's the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, she grew up in a Tudor manor in England, they had a whirlwind romance in London, they have three year old twins on whom they dote, and he's recreated her family home on the banks of the Hudson and renamed it Illyria. Yes, there are rumors that she's having an affair with the architect, but rumors are rumors and people will gossip. But then Bayard is found dead with a knife in his chest on the night of their Twelfth Night Ball, Annabelle goes missing, presumed drowned, and the papers go mad. Bay's sister, Janie, forms an unlikely alliance with a reporter to uncover the truth, convinced that Bay would never have killed his wife, that it must be a third party, but the more she learns about her brother and his wife, the more everything she thought she knew about them starts to unravel. Who were her brother and his wife, really? And why did her brother die with the name George on his lips?

Free sample

The English Wife

Cold Spring, 1899

Twelfth Night

They say he's bankrupted himself rebuilding the house'”all for her, of course.' Carrie Rheinlander's voice carried along the high, arched ceiling. 'œAnd then there are those frightful stories about . . . oh, Janie! I didn't see you there.'

No one ever did.

Sometimes, Janie felt like the threads on an old tapestry, blending into the background. That backdrop served its own purpose, Janie knew, but once, just once, she wished she could blaze out in a luster of silver and gold.

But not here. Here, everyone glittered, everyone blazed. Her brother's guests dazzled in garb that would have put a Medici to shame, every breast adorned with diamonds and rubies, every neck hung round with gold chains. The men peacocked in tights and short cloaks; the women dazzled in silks and velvets woven with gold and sewn with jewels. Janie's own costume seemed modest in comparison, the garnets set in and around the squared neckline subdued in their opulence, the poor cousin of rubies.

'œCarrie.' Janie acknowledged Carrie's greeting with a shy nod. They had played dolls together, made their debut together, but Carrie had no time for her now. Carrie had married and Janie hadn't. Against that, all the bonds of kinship and childhood counted as nothing.

Carrie lifted a jeweled hand in acknowledgment, but she was already sailing past. 'œPoor Janie Van Duyvil,' she murmured to her companion. 'œAll that money and still on the shelf.'

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Why I love it

A dazzling journey through the New York high society of the Gilded Age, where dresses and rumors are more important than politics, The English Wife drips with both Shakespeare references and near-pornographic descriptions of flapper-era fashion and well-appointed townhomes. It’s tempting to call this novel a mystery, but its scope is far wider than a whodunit: It’s a broad examination of culture and class at the turn of the twentieth century.

Brayard Van Duyvil is the impressively-named prodigal son of a prominent New York family and heir to its massive fortune. After his scandalous death and the disappearance of his new young bride, Brayard’s sister, Janie, tries to uncover the truth. Was it a murder/suicide? A stranger who killed them both and ran off into the night? Or neither? Janie aligns herself with a young reporter and discovers secrets about her family that she never would have expected. Janie’s story alternates with another, five years earlier and told from the perspective of an actress who had befriended Brayard on a trip long ago. As the reader jumps back and forth between the stories, we become privy to a gradual drip of information that unfurls the central mystery.

What makes this book truly unputdownable is Willig’s prose: clean and sharp, as if every sentence has been carved from a block of ice. Willig conjures a mood of candlelight and cobblestones, of heavy velvet dresses and newspapers with smeared print. It’s a bonbon of a book in the best way; in which every page feels like a secret indulgence, best read alone, curled up while wearing your most luxurious pajamas, or else while traveling by train to somewhere very far away.

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One by One
We Solve Murders
The Return of Ellie Black
All the Colors of the Dark
The Paris Apartment
Arsenic and Adobo
Long Bright River
The Maid
The Turn of the Key
The Woman in Cabin 10
When the Stars Go Dark
The Broken Girls
Still Lives
The It Girl
Like a Sister
Death on the Nile