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The Hunting Wives by May Cobb

Thriller

The Hunting Wives

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 May Cobb

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Quick take

Better than bourbon and biscuits, this sizzling story stars southern belles on the hunt in more ways than one.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Unlikeable_Narrator

    Unlikeable narrator

  • Illustrated icon, Salacious

    Salacious

  • Illustrated icon, Murder

    Murder

  • Illustrated icon, Mama_Drama

    Mama drama

Synopsis

Sophie O’Neill left behind an envy-inspiring career and the stressful, competitive life of big-city Chicago to settle down with her husband and young son in a small Texas town. It seems like the perfect life with a beautiful home in an idyllic rural community. But Sophie soon realizes that life is now too quiet, and she’s feeling bored and restless.

Then she meets Margot Banks, an alluring socialite who is part of an elite clique secretly known as the Hunting Wives. Sophie finds herself completely drawn to Margot and swept into her mysterious world of late-night target practice and dangerous partying. As Sophie’s curiosity gives way to full-blown obsession, she slips farther away from the safety of her family and deeper into this nest of vipers.

When the body of a teenage girl is discovered in the woods where the Hunting Wives meet, Sophie finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation and her life spiraling out of control.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of The Hunting Wives.

The Hunting Wives

Prologue

I keep seeing her face, upturned in the pool. Her long hair darkened by the water, stringy and tangled and noodling around her neck. Her eyes are closed, her body floating. Her lips are parted just slightly, and it looks as if she’s resting, tranquil and at peace.

Of course, it wasn’t like that at all. Her body was found facedown in a puddle of mud-soaked leaves. A shotgun blast had shredded her back. She was slumped down next to the edge of the lake, and near the silty shoreline, the lake water is the color of rust, not a sparkling turquoise. But the pool was the first place I saw her.

A week later, she was dead.

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Why I love it

When The Hunting Wives begins, its narrator Sophie has a life that seems enviable: a peaceful, serene home with her doting, supportive husband and their adorable toddler Jack. She’s curated a slower-paced life some mothers could only dream of: solo nature jogs, time to transform her well-tended garden into homemade meals, and a passion project she can complete on her own timetable. But, also like many mothers, Sophie spends her days battling boredom and questioning the monotony of marriage and child-rearing. She has an unconscious, long-simmering attraction to the chaos which surrounded her childhood.

Enter Margot, an elegant, fiery, and downright sexy high-society darling. Sophie develops a distant attraction and eventually wills her way into Margot’s orbit, and is quickly invited as the fifth member of the super-secret clique of women who drink, shoot skeet with shotguns, and reveal their proclivity for not-so-innocent extramarital adventures. As Sophie falls further under the hunting wives’ influence, she finds herself tangled up in a web of lies and deceit, all while harboring a secret of her own: her burgeoning attraction to and unhealthy obsession with Margot. When a young woman’s dead body is found on Margot’s property, Sophie’s willingness to protect Margot at all costs threatens to unravel all that Sophie holds dear.

This book is a wild, exciting ride, and it’s refreshing to see a heroine struggle to reconcile what’s expected of her with what she actually wants. I followed Sophie into her mistakes, simultaneously ignoring the warning signs and willing her in vain to stop now and turn around before it’s too late. This story is about a mysterious murder, but it’s also about the mystery of sexuality, security, and the lengths we go to preserve and defend the ones we love. Ultimately, nothing is tied up in a perfect, pretty bow, and I love The Hunting Wives, and its flawed heroine, all the more for it.

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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
Someone in the Attic
One Perfect Couple
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Darling Girls
Kill for Me, Kill for You
Bad Tourists
Murder Road
Daughter of Mine
The Fury
Only if You’re Lucky
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 Collective
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
The Last Flight
Reckless Girls
The House Across the Lake
The Wife Upstairs
The Last Thing He Told Me
The Maidens
Everything We Didn't Say
Invisible Girl
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 Winter Sister
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