The Perfect Marriage

Thrillers, suspense, and mysteries are all new territory for me. When I picked up The Perfect Marriage, I was definitely stepping outside my usual Romantasy comfort zone, so I really wasn’t sure how it was going to go. Turns out, I had absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only did I enjoy it, I liked it enough that by the time I finished, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on The Perfect Divorce.

The story follows Sarah and Adam Morgan, who have been married for ten years and whose marriage is definitely not as perfect as the title would have you believe. Sarah is a successful criminal defense attorney, Adam is a struggling writer, and somewhere along the way Adam decides having an affair with Kelly Summers is a good idea. It is not. Kelly ends up brutally murdered at the lake house where she and Adam have been meeting, Adam becomes the prime suspect, and Sarah suddenly finds herself defending her cheating husband against a murder charge.

The story alternates between Sarah and Adam’s POVs, and I really liked getting both sides because they see their marriage very differently. Adam feels neglected and overshadowed by Sarah’s career, while Sarah knows work has taken up a lot of her time but still loves her husband. I could understand how their marriage got to the point it did without agreeing with Adam’s solution to the problem. The man somehow manages to convince himself that he loves both women, which did absolutely nothing to earn him sympathy from me. Sir, that is not how this works.

Sarah was easily the more interesting of the two for me. She learns her husband has been cheating because his mistress has been murdered, and then has to put her own feelings aside long enough to defend him. She’s smart, controlled, determined, and very good at her job. She’s obviously hurt and angry, but she doesn’t let Adam or the situation completely knock her down. Adam, meanwhile, spent a good portion of the book testing my patience with his choices and excuses. I didn’t hate reading his POV, though. If anything, being inside his head just gave me more opportunities to argue with him.

Once the investigation gets going, there are plenty of reasons to question what actually happened. Kelly has secrets of her own, there are other people who could have wanted her dead, and every new piece of information seems to point in another direction. This book held my attention, and just when I thought I had it figured out, I was wrong! Lol. I would settle on a theory, become completely convinced I knew what happened, and then something else would come along and ruin it. Eventually, I stopped pretending I knew where Jeneva was taking me and just enjoyed trying to figure it out.

The short chapters and alternating POVs kept everything moving pretty well, although the middle slowed down a little in places while the investigation worked through the different suspects and evidence. There were also a few legal and investigative details that made me question how realistically everything would actually play out, but neither bothered me enough to take me out of the story. More importantly, I never reached that point where my attention started wandering, which says quite a bit considering this was my first time reading anything like this.

I’m definitely not spoiling the ending because figuring out what happened is half the fun of reading a mystery, but I can safely say Jeneva got me. I thought I knew. I was confident I knew. I did not know. Once everything came together, it changed the way I looked at quite a few things that had happened earlier in the book, and I loved that I could look back and realize some of the answers had been sitting there while I was busy looking somewhere else.

There is some explicit sexual content, mostly surrounding Adam’s affair with Kelly, so I’m giving this 2/5 peppers. It’s there and some of it is on-page, but it isn’t the focus of the story. This is definitely about the murder, the investigation, the secrets, and figuring out who you can actually trust.

Overall, The Perfect Marriage gets 4.5/5 stars from me. There were a few slower spots and some things I questioned along the way, but none of them mattered enough to outweigh how much I enjoyed the story. For a book in genres I had never really been interested in reading before, this one did a pretty freaking good job of proving I may have been overlooking something.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It held my attention, kept me guessing, made me confidently wrong more than once, and apparently opened the door to an entirely new section of the bookstore for me. Considering I finished it already wanting The Perfect Divorce, I’d say stepping outside my Romantasy comfort zone worked out pretty well.

Review By: SASSY
Owner • Creator • Queen of the Chaos
SassyReviews.com
Read, Reviewed, & BookDragon Approved… or Not.