Breakaway Books

Authored by Alice Feeney; Published June 2026; Thriller

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

My Husband’s Wife strikes me as very similar to a puzzle box turned on its head. There’s a lot going on, tons of clues and red herrings, and I felt like I was scrambling to put all the pieces together before I closed the novel.

In My Husband’s Wife, Eden Fox arrives home after a run… and can’t get back into her house. Her key doesn’t fit, her husband doesn’t recognize her, and there’s another woman who claims to be Eden herself. Eden has no idea what’s going on, but she’s sure she can find someone, somewhere, who can verify her identity. Miles away, Detective Chief Inspector Olivia Bird receives a devastating cancer diagnosis and decides that it’s time to go home to Hope Falls for her final months. Little does she know that her path is about to collide with Eden’s.

It bears repeating that there is a lot going on in this thriller. If you’ve read Frieda McFadden’s novels (see my reviews of The Tenant and Dear Debbie), this novel has some similar vibes: Who is not who they say they are? Who’s hiding a life-changing secret? But I prefer this thriller to McFadden’s, largely because it is much more complex. It feels impossible to guess precisely what is going on, and yet I wasn’t angry when I read the conclusion, because it would have been possible for me to put the pieces together. The premise of Eden coming home to find she has been replaced is a breath-stopping introduction that immediately immerses the reader in the story, and it certainly keeps moving from there. It was very hard to put this one down.

One of the key ideas that plays a big role in this novel is that the date of someone’s death can be predicted precisely, and that people have a right to know this information for “planning purposes.” This is possibly the most ridiculous concept in the whole book–less that the date could be predicted, because, sure, if we’re only counting health-related deaths, I’m certain that some company somewhere could make a good guess. But the idea that people would want to know this information? Absolutely not. I can’t imagine how I would deal with that knowledge, and when Olivia Bird, one of the main characters, receives her death date, she goes off the rails. Can you imagine the societal chaos that would ensue if more than even a few individuals knew when they would die?

My Husband’s Wife is the perfect thriller to keep you guessing from the first page to the last. Trust me, you’ll finish it in no time.