A HAPPY MARRIAGE

Fans seeing this title and this author’s name on the same cover will know to expect anything but the celebration of a happy marriage.

Yet Dinah and Joe Marino really are happy together. She’s a homicide detective with the LAPD; he’s a psychologist who left the police to open his own clinic. They may not have much of a sex life, but they’re so mindful, attentive, and solicitous of each other that, as Dinah says, “He’s the best part of my life, and I’m the best part of his.” So what if Dinah’s been hiding an easily guessed secret from Joe for all eight years of their marriage? So what if Joe wonders what it would be like to kill Dinah the way he’s killed those other women? After all, he’s not at all inclined to do it because she’s the perfect wife. The first cracks in their ice castle appear when Dinah, still mourning the death of her partner, Det. Oley Hugh, is assigned to investigate the death of Reese Bishop and learns that trainee detective Freddie Hodgkins will be tagging along with her. Freddie is full of ideas about the manner of Reese’s death—she seems to have overdosed months before she would have died of natural causes—and the disappearance of her daughter, Jessica, who never showed up at Chunky Mike’s, the ice cream parlor where she works. In fact, Jessica, whose point of view alternates with Dinah’s and Joe’s in a series of chapters as short and biting as lightning strikes, has descended into a hell that will eventually reveal unspeakable secrets about Dinah and Joe’s happy marriage.

A modern take on the Bluebeard fairy tale, complete with a chamber of horrors.