Book Review | The Perfect Wife #20booksofsummer

The challenge will shortly be drawing to a close, but luckily I have finished another book to add to my list which takes me up to 10 books, which was really my goal for this year’s challenge!

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The perfect life. The perfect love. The perfect lie. From the bestselling author of The Girl Before comes a gripping new psychological thriller. . . .

Abbie awakens in a daze with no memory of who she is or how she landed in this unsettling condition. The man by her side claims to be her husband. He’s a titan of the tech world, the founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most innovative start-ups. He tells Abbie that she is a gifted artist, an avid surfer, a loving mother to their young son, and the perfect wife. He says she had a terrible accident five years ago and that, through a huge technological breakthrough, she has been brought back from the abyss.

She is a miracle of science.

But as Abbie pieces together memories of her marriage, she begins questioning her husband’s motives–and his version of events. Can she trust him when he says he wants them to be together forever? And what really happened to Abbie half a decade ago?

Amazon | Goodreads | Book Depository

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There are some authors that I would pick up automatically without really looking at the blurb and after reading Believe Me last year JP Delaney became one of those authors. So I have to say I was pretty surprised when I started reading The Perfect Wife because I really wasn’t expecting the artificial intelligence aspect to this story.

It did throw me a little, that and the tense of writing used, and to be honest I did start to wonder if maybe I wasn’t going to enjoy this one as much as I’d hoped. I stuck with it though and I am exceptionally glad that I did, as once again JP Delaney has created a book with an obsessive and chilling tension that I could not put down.

The thing that continues to work brilliantly in this book is the fact that I can never predict what will happen next, sometimes when reading psychological thrillers I have suddenly come to the answer of who or why and it becomes a very conscious part of my reading experience, which means I might not enjoy the book as much. With this book any time my brain thought it was making a connection, that I might have figured something out, my theory was blown out of the water. I was definitely kept on my toes, the suspense was just perfect and gave me that edge of my seat feeling.

I think what I appreciate so much about this authors style is that everything has a purpose, even if you don’t recognize that at first. As I mentioned before it is written in an unusual tense and the chapters switch between Abbie and an unknown narrator and by the end of the book when I realised why those choices were made, it took my engagement with the book to a whole other level. It’s the kind of revelation that makes me think about it for days, weeks and sometimes months afterwords and JP Delaney seems to manage it effortlessly every time.

I feel like I want to delve into the characters but I don’t want to say anything that will ruin the reading experience for anyone else so what I will say is Abbie being AI and having the cross over between her ‘memories’ and her own sentience was very interesting and made for some exciting reading.

There is another thing that is hard to go into without giving too much away but what I will say is that there was an aspect of the ending that I was a little disappointed in, I think it felt a little tacked on almost. Perhaps it’s just that in a book that is so clever and that has covered its bases pretty much all the way through there is a little niggle, something that I questioned, I’m not sure. It didn’t change my enjoyment of the book overall, I think it’s just that my expectations were high and I wasn’t expecting to feel like that at the end of an otherwise amazing book.

The Perfect Wife has certainly cemented JP Delaney as one of my go-to authors and I have to say I am intrigued to find out what subject matter will be explored in the next book because I’m looking forward to it already.

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