My Lovely Wife is about a couple that murders to bring sparks to their love life. It is a hobby that starts unintentionally, but after seeing how the hunt and thrill that comes with murder reignites their love-life, the husband and wife duo are convinced to keep on killing for fun. But when your hobbies are torture and murder, it’s easy to get carried away.

I picked up this book as a buddy read with two of the fellow mods over at The Book Coven, and while I was intrigued by the plot and story itself (especially seeing as I’ve been reading thrillers a bit more frequently lately), I still should have waited with reading this one. I just wasn’t in the right mood for a thriller I think, and it led to me not appreciating what was well done about this one. Additionally, it didn’t help that My Lovely Wife is a quite different set-up from what I expected from the synopsis. Specifically, it isn’t a duo that loves killing but rather a wife who gets off on control/is pleased by hurting others and a husband who is pretty passive and therefore kinda just goes along with whatever his wife wants. This passivity is probably what killed the book overall for me, along with the easy to guess twist.

Twists, to me, are one of the most important parts of thrillers. If I can guess it quite early on, my motivation to read on dies very quickly. Unfortunately, that happened here. While I didn’t guess the extent of the twist, I guessed a lot of the shocking twists and turns that led up to the final reveal, so it made all this ‘whaaaat?’ moments turn into ‘yea okay so I was right’ moments. From the other Goodreads reviews I’ve seen, it seems like a lot of people were able to guess this twist as well, so hopefully it is better hidden in future books!

The characters were also something that was hit or miss. Now, of course I didn’t like them as people, as you weren’t really supposed to, but there were some overbearing traits that frustrated me. Specifically, my issues were with the husband’s passivity, which led to some scenes and moments that were rather boring and monotone, especially near the end. However, I did like the relationship between the husband and wife and how the novel explored the dynamic there, as well as the rationalizing the husband constantly did in his head. It made for some very interesting scenes and inner monologues.

In connection with that, I also quite liked the writing style and the viewpoints it ended up providing. I’ve read books from the POV of victims and books from the POV of stalkers, but the husband falls somewhere in between the two, neither true villain to true victim. It also caused the ending to make me feel quite uneasy, as since I didn’t have a true opinion regarding the main character, I couldn’t decide how I really felt about how the story ended up ending. It’s still leaving me questioning.

Overall, I didn’t dislike this book at all. The “it was just ok” that goes with the two-star rating is very fitting for how I felt about this book, and while a lot of that was due to the timing of me reading this, I can’t blame my meh experience all on myself either. However, it seems like a lot of people still enjoyed this regardless of the predictable twist, so I would still recommend you at least give this book a shot.