THE SECRET LIVES OF MARRIED WOMEN
by Elissa Wald
Paperback, Hard Case Crime, 2013
218 pages,$ 9.95
Reviewed by Mario Guslandi
Here’s a book hard to categorize. Horror? Crime? Hardly. A psychological thriller? Perhaps.
An erotic book as the lurid picture cover and some blurbs in the back cover seem to suggest?
No way.
Here’s a book hard to review, too. A very original plot? Not quite. An example of elegantly written prose? Not exactly. A novel so spellbinding to maintain all the time suspension of disbelief? No.
Yet…I tell you, this is a book that’s hard to put down. Now and then, just when you’re starting to feel a bit bored,something happens that makes you alert and eager to go on.
The story is about two twin sisters, one with a disreputable sexual history, now turned into a good wife and caring mother, living a respectable life , the other an attorney sexually repressed and unable to properly satisfy her husband.
A stalking neighbour will unsettle the former and a tough trial will emancipate the latter and this is all I can tell without giving up too much and spoil the pleasure to discover what’s going on in the book.
By no means a perfect novel, yet… Am I planning to read any further book by this author, Elissa Wald ? You bet. And you should do likewise.
