The Wives

By Tarryn Fisher

Graydon House     2019

336 pages     Domestic Thriller

Why, why, why are there so many books with unreliable narrators? And. . . .are there ever mysteries where the unreliable narrator is a man? Well, I guess there are, but most of the unreliable narrators I have read during the course of this blog have been female; i.e. The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, or Speaking of Summer.

Thursday is the narrator of The Wives, and boy is she ever unreliable! She is a nurse married to a businessman named Seth. Seth, we find out very early, is married to three women—two in Portland, and Thursday in Seattle. Seth has business in both places. Thursday knew this about Seth when she married him. She calls the other two wives Monday and Tuesday because those are the days when Seth is with those women, and that is all Thursday knows about them. Seth comes from a family of polygamists, but he is not interested in a sister wife situation, and over the span of several years, he has done a good job keeping all lives separate.

Thursday becomes quite restless with this marriage situation for several reasons: she is tired of only seeing Seth one day a week (Thursday, of course); she is curious about the Monday and Tuesday wives, and she has recently suffered a disastrous miscarriage that has left her unable to have children. Her world begins to fall apart. At this point, the book takes a sharp turn that is frankly not surprising. The Kirkus reviewer says, “It’s all a bit over the top, but Fisher is a slick writer who keeps a tight reign on her lightning-fast plot, and the lengths that her feisty narrator goes to in order to reclaim her life.”

I have a huge pile of to-be-read books, and the number of interesting books coming out in January is intense. Occasionally, while I was reading The Wives, I asked myself why I kept spending time on this domestic thriller, but it is to the author’s credit that I kept reading. Today, I reached the point of no return, and I spent the entire afternoon turning pages as fast as I could. The conclusion is shocking, and satisfying all at the same time!

Although Thursday is not an appealing protagonist, Fisher is able to portray her so that the reader doesn’t hate her. Sometimes she seems very aware of the crisis she is creating, but other times she is totally out of control. At one point Thursday muses, “We busy ourselves trying not to be lonely, trying to find purpose in careers, and lovers, and children, but at any moment, those things we work so hard to possess could be taken from us.” She feels that “the whole world is as fragile and lonely as I am.” Besides that, Seth, her husband, is a first-class jerk!

Tarryn Fisher is the author of ten novels. Her website says that she “writes about villains.” Love that!