The Wife Before - Shanora Williams

Author: Shanora Williams

Narrator: Tracey Conyer Lee

Genre: Domestic Thriller

Rating: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Oh boy! With such hateful characters, I didn’t care who lived or died. I just wanted to reach the end.

Story Synopsis:

Samira Wilder, basically a classy good-for-nothing, has fallen in love with the rich and handsome pro golfer Roland Graham. The only hitch is that her brother Kellan and her best friend want her to stay away from Roland. Reason? He’s been accused of murdering his late wife, though the crime was never proved and her death was ultimately ruled an accident. Samira trusts her new beau and accepts his proposal willingly, even when it involves moving to his house in Miami, where he stayed during his first marriage. What follows is the usual secrets and misleading communications that make Samira question her situation.

The story comes to us in the first person pov of Samira, and also of Melanie, Roland’s first wife whose communication happens through the journals she wrote.

Where the book worked for me:

I don’t know! I just know I wasn’t bored enough to discontinue the book. Maybe the audio version helped.

Ok, there’s one thing I loved.

👌 The prologue. It sets such a nice and creepy tone for the story. But… (continued below)

Where the book didn’t work for me: (Get ready for a long list now.)

☠ (continued from above)…it doesn’t come up in the main story at all. I still don’t know when and why and how the incidents in the prologue occurred!

☠ The characters do their best to aggravate your nerves. Samira is established as a self-serving kind of character right at the start, jobless, mooching off her brother’s money and later Roland’s. (When you realise that she is twenty-eight, the whole thing becomes even more annoying!) Roland is sketched haphazardly - sometimes quiet, sometimes outgoing, sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes evil. Melanie is also sketched in mixed hues. Of these, only Melanie can escape with some leeway as the unreliable narrator because we know her only through her journals. But when the first person narration is by Samira and she deliberately misleads, it is a sign of shabby character development.

☠ Other than the now-overused unreliable narrator trope, we also have the ‘dead wife’s journals’ trope. When this is written well, this trope works wonderfully for domestic thrillers. In this book, the journal entries aren’t written like journal entries but like an author writes a book, complete with direct quotes and detailed description of looks and scenes. Who writes all that in a journal! Only a couple of times does it feel like Melanie is speaking through her journal. What is also funny is that Samira took multiple days to read through those journals but Roland completes them within a couple of hours at most. What is even funnier is that the journals were kept out in the open. Two characters in the story know that the journals contain misleading information about their beloved Roland, and yet neither destroyed nor hid them, thus leading to Samira finding them easily. It was so silly!

☠ More illogical character flaws:

• If you are famous, could you go alone anywhere to investigate without the paps following you? Especially when it has already been established that the media hound the character in concern even when they are out on dates?
• If you are filthy rich, would you do your own investigation or hire the best detectives to find out stuff?
• Related to the above: If you are filthy rich, would you call your house your “home” or your “mansion”?
• If you have to locate someone, would you go and ask their recently-released-from-jail rapist where they were?

Sheesh!

☠ There’s a whole load of info dumping at the end about the modus operandi of what happened.

☠ There are a few paranormal occurrences written in to make the writing spookier. The whats and whys of these are never explained.

☠ The chapters are very short, which will definitely aid to going through the book quicker. However, the chapter divisions are weird. Like Melanie’s journal entries also span multiple chapters even if it is a single entry. Doesn’t make sense.

☠ The dialogues seem repetitive at times. The same question/statement that is spoken is repeated within a few sentences, almost as if the characters aren’t even hearing each other speak.

☠ As a domestic thriller, the book ought to have had a few good twists and surprises. But with one exception, nothing came as a pleasantly shocking revelation. Most were twists because of the characters’ abrupt change in stance.

The audiobook experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 10 hours, is narrated by Tracey Conyer Lee. I was pretty impressed by her at the start as she gave a distinct voice to the two first-person narrations. But after Melanie’s third appearance, maybe she forgot the separate voice and began narrating both Melanie and Samira the same way. This becomes very confusing when there are multiple chapters for each of them with no clarity on who is speaking. A newbie audiobook listener will be absolutely confused with such an experience. Having a separate narrator for Melanie would have been better.

Also, her narration was so slow! For the first time ever, I heard an audiobook at 1.75-2x speeds and still felt like she was absolutely clear. (This is good in a way, I suppose. I completed the book faster.)

Basically, I am okay with suspending disbelief but the word ‘suspension’ always involves the idea that it is temporary. You can’t expect me to suspend disbelief for an entire book. This story contains mostly done-to-death tropes and average writing. Strictly a one-time read if you feel like going for a slow-burn domestic thriller. Nothing memorable, nothing novel.

2 stars.

My thanks to RB Media and NetGalley for the ALC of “The Wife Before”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.