Some thrillers start with a body. The Marriage Lie starts with a departures board. Kimberly Belle's 2017 novel takes the most ordinary goodbye in a marriage, a husband heading off on a work trip, and turns it into a question its heroine cannot stop asking: who did I actually marry?
The premise, without spoilers
Iris and Will Griffith live what looks like a near-perfect life in a comfortable Atlanta neighbourhood. They have good careers, a house they love and plans to start a family. Will flies out for a business trip to Orlando. A few hours later a plane bound for Seattle crashes, and Will's name is on the passenger list. Either the airline is wrong, or her husband lied about where he was going. Iris refuses to accept the official version and starts pulling at the threads of Will's life, which turn out to be far longer than she knew.
Everything we say here comes from the first chapters and the publisher's own description. The pleasure of the book is in the reveals, so we will not go further.
What works
- A heroine who acts. Iris grieves, but she also investigates, and the book is better for it. She makes phone calls, travels, confronts people and makes mistakes.
- Pace. Short chapters and a steady drip of new information make this an easy two-evening read, or a single long flight if you are brave.
- A real question underneath. How much of a partner's past are we entitled to know? Book clubs will find plenty to argue about.
What may not work for you
If you read a lot of domestic suspense you may guess one or two turns before Iris does, and a few supporting characters exist mainly to move the plot along. The ending ties things up neatly; readers who prefer ambiguity may want something darker.
At a glance
- Author
- Kimberly Belle
- Published
- 2017
- Genre
- Domestic suspense
- Setting
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Good for
- Book clubs, a long flight, readers who like a fast mystery
- Our rating
- 4 out of 5
A gamble on trust, and the odds we misjudge
What keeps this premise working is how badly humans judge rare events. Commercial air travel is one of the safest ways to move around the world, and the chance that any one flight ends in a fatal crash is tiny. Yet a single crash dominates the news for days, so it feels far more likely than it is. Psychologists call this the availability heuristic: we estimate how probable something is by how easily an example comes to mind.
It is the same quirk that sells lottery tickets. A jackpot winner on the evening news makes winning feel possible, while the hundreds of millions of losing tickets never get a segment. The odds of hitting the top prize in the big US draws are roughly one in 290 million, yet a whole office or school-gate group will happily chip in on a Friday. If that sounds like you, our guide to how a parents' lottery pool works explains how to run one fairly, with the real numbers. Iris, meanwhile, is betting on something harder to calculate: that the man she loved was who he said he was.
Who should read it
Pick it up if you enjoyed Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train but want something less bleak, or if your book club needs a title that everyone will actually finish. It also works well as an audiobook for the school run, with the volume down when little ears are in the car.
Pair it with: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, the original story of strangers with secrets, or our grown-up roundup of casino thrillers and poker books.