THE WIFE YOU KNOW

An act of sudden heroism plunges a woman and her family into danger.

As Ashley Driskell drives past a day care center in Vail, Colorado, it bursts into flames. Launching herself into the building, Ashley doesn’t stop until she’s led everyone inside to safety. Another passerby has caught the one-woman rescue operation on video, and that video proves to be Ashley’s undoing. After her husband, millionaire software developer Luke Driskell, visits her in the hospital, she sneaks out around 2 a.m. The next morning, when Luke checks on Ashley’s 3-year-old daughter, Joy, she’s gone, too, presumably snatched by the mother who’s gone on the lam. So far, so suspenseful: The opening chapters are as irresistible as the first precipitous drop in a roller coaster. But when Luke looks for clues to Ashley’s whereabouts, the formulaic complications undermine the suspense. Ashley, it turns out, had several alternative identities, and as FBI agent Danny Lamar tells Luke, “The wife you know doesn’t exist.” Lamar’s murder leaves Luke to pick up the pieces, an endeavor that involves travel by hired jet to the far-flung places where people knew Ashley under different identities, the unmasking of another self-proclaimed FBI agent as an imposter, and mounting rumors of misdeeds long ago during a trip Ashley made to China as evangelical Sarah Bowman. Readers coming to this novel from Family Money (2022) will find that although the details have changed, an awful lot of its plot feels as if it’s been recycled from Zunker’s last novel.

The same but different, only not that much different.