Publishers Weekly
02/13/2023
One day in 2018, Abby Crenshaw, the protagonist of this disappointing domestic thriller from Hyde (the Crime with the Classics mysteries), returns to her upscale home in Santa Cruz, Calif., to find her husband, Charles, “lying on his face with blood all over his head.” She knows he’s dead. What she doesn’t know is whether she killed him. Flashbacks to 2015 describe Abby’s first meeting with dashing, debonair, and wealthy Charles Crenshaw Junior when they were both attending law school at California’s Santa Clara University, as well as their whirlwind romance, their wedding, significant—if often disturbing—moments in their married life (including the unplanned birth of their daughter), and Abby’s growing fear that she’s losing her mind. Back in 2018, Abby and police detective Peter Rocher, the investigating officer on the Crenshaw case, share narrative duties. Peter is under pressure from the chief of police, a golfing buddy of Crenshaw Senior’s, to find the killer. The victim turns out to have absolutely no redeeming qualities, and the solution of his murder owes more to chance than detection. This one’s execution falls short of its promising setup. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc. (Apr.)
Booklist on Death with Dostoevsky
Effectively blends romance and mystery
Booklist on Arsenic with Austen
An engaging start to a series
Kirkus Reviews
2023-01-25
A woman’s horror at the murder of her husband is tempered by abject relief that he’s dead and compounded by fear that she may have been his killer.
It doesn’t take long for Abigail Taylor to sour on Charles Crenshaw Jr. Yes, he’s the handsome and attentive son of wealthy parents. But, as she realizes soon after their storybook courtship and wedding, he’s also selfish, narcissistic, sadistically domineering, unsupportive of the legal career she’d planned to complement his own, and indifferent to the welfare of both Abby and their baby daughter, Emma, whom he and his father, an attorney who lives in the exclusive enclave of Los Altos Hills, reject because she’s not a boy they can count on to carry on the family name. Abby’s misery is deepened by her discovery that Emma is deaf. Since Charles won’t think of trading in his Porsche or asking his father for $40,000 for the cochlear implants that might give Emma the ability to hear, Abby joins forces with her older sister, Ellen Stepanovich, to start a GoFundMe page in hopes of raising the money. Meantime, she’s suffered so many bouts of forgetfulness and so many blackouts that she fears she’s losing her mind. The stormy marriage ends with Abby’s discovery of her husband’s blood-drenched corpse. Is it possible that she could have killed him herself during one of those blackouts? Santa Cruz Det. Peter Rocher, who fights his superior in defense of his belief that Abby isn’t a self-made widow, cracks the case by the simple expedient of reading the journal Charles kept.
A familiar tale of gaslighting with a payoff as emotionally satisfying as it is unbelievable.
