You know that feeling when a book is doing the absolute most and you’re both exhausted and kind of impressed at the same time? That’s My Husband’s Wife in a nutshell.
Alice Feeney is not here to give you a chill reading experience. She is here to make you question every single character, every single sentence, and frankly your own ability to read a story. I respect the chaos, even when it drove me a little crazy.
The pacing is relentless. Feeney does not let you breathe, which is either a feature or a bug depending on your tolerance for thriller chaos. The twists are genuinely surprising, and the identity thriller angle is executed well enough that you feel satisfyingly stupid when things click into place.
What didn’t work as well for me was the sheer volume of unreliable narrators. At a certain point, when every single character is lying about their entire identity and history, it stops feeling tense and starts feeling exhausting. There’s a difference between “I can’t trust anyone” and “nothing in this book is real, so why am I emotionally invested?” and My Husband’s Wife occasionally tips into the second category.
The ending also does a lot of heavy lifting. Some of it lands. Some of it feels like Feeney opened a bag of twists and just shook them all out at once.
I landed at three stars. This is a solid read, not a disappointment. If you like Alice Feeney, you’ll probably like this because it has all her signatures. If you’re new to her, I’d actually start somewhere else and come back to this one once you’re calibrated to her chaos level.