The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

In The Wife Between Us, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen take you on a wild roller coaster ride full of twists and turns. Vanessa and Richard’s marriage has fallen apart, and he’s dating a new (and younger) woman, whom Vanessa is stalking. Nellie is bright-eyed and excited for her future with Richard, but she has some lingering trauma from college and feels like someone is out to get her. While cleverly done, the first part of the book feels too similar to Girl On The Train somehow; woman is left by husband, is falling apart and drinking too much, and is following her ex and his new girl. The first twist takes it on a different course, which was well done, but by then end it’s almost one twist too many. 

There’s a lot of gaslighting going on in this book (definition per Wikipedia: a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief.) This is sort of trendy now I guess, but it does make me wonder – isn’t the whole psychological suspense genre with an unreliable narrator one big gaslight on the reader anyways? Something to ponder…