The Husband's Secret - Liane Moriarty

★★

Read : January 2014

"From the author of the critically acclaimed 'What Alice Forgot' comes a breakout new novel about the secrets husbands and wives keep from each other.

'My Darling Cecilia,
If you're reading this, then I've died...'

Imagine your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret - something so terrible it would destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others too. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive...
Cecilia Fitzpatrick achieved it all - she's an incredibly successful business woman, a pillar of her small community and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia - or each other - but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband's devastating secret."

The Husband's Secret follows three women and their families, secrets and tragedies. Tess, a shy business woman who's Husband's revelation sends her and their son to live with her Mother whilst she re-evaluates the direction of her marriage and her life. Rachel, a grief-stricken mother who lost her Daughter to a man she faces each day who has never been brought to justice. And Cecilia, who in the middle of her perfect, ordered life finds a letter from her Husband that could cause shock waves throughout their family and beyond.

It's worth mentioning that this was a Book Club read for me and isn't the kind of book I would usually pick up off the shelf. Saying that, it sounded like there was potential there that, for me, the author couldn't quite capture. The whole book felt like it could have been much darker and, whilst I appreciate that Moriarty confronted the issue in an easy-to-read, almost chick-lit style book, it felt like an opportunity missed. It could have become a more convincing read if it had explored deeper and further.

I found the massive amount of characters tricky to get a handle on at first, this wasn't made any easier by the book chopping and changing between them each chapter and it felt as if, within a few pages, I was thrown around all of the characters and left totally confused. It was hard to keep track of who was who and what was happening to whom. After a while it got a bit easier and switching between the characters helped to build suspense by leaving off at crucial cliff hangar's. I found the book very difficult to get into at first but the gentle humour and 'the big secret' kept me reading.

Throughout the novel the characters seemed a bit disconnected from each other but as the story went on their lives gradually began to weave into each others. The 'big secret' did come as a shock to me and at times I felt as Cecilia would have, in a Catch-22, where whatever action she took or decision she made would not be right. I wish the novel had spent more time with Cecilia and ditched the rather unlikeable, doormat Tess more often, as I'd expected from the blurb. I think it could have been a much more intense novel if that had been the case.

Overall, I wasn't too impressed with The Husband's Secret. Although it was put together cleverly and was reasonably easy to read (once you got into it) I found it didn't quite deliver what I was hoping it would and fell a little flat. Not one I'd recommend if I'm honest, which is a shame, because it had the potential to be much better than it turned out to be.