Does Adam deserve the death penalty for murder? No. Does Adam deserve the death penalty for being a brain-dead idiot who spends 200+ pages making stupid mistake after stupid mistake? Yes. 

 

Adam and Sarah are both wildly inconsistent in their motivations from chapter-to-chapter. In one chapter Sarah doesn’t want to find the identity of the third DNA because she thinks that it will help her case, but three chapters later she is tracking down the DNA herself. In one chapter Adam believes that Scott is the killer, but three chapters later he is completely convinced that it is someone from Kelly’s past. 

 

The characters are all cartoonishly over-the-top in everything they say and do. Adam’s relationship with his mother, Eleanor, is the perfect example of this. Eleanor just exists to be a caricature of a horrible Mother-in-law. Adam was a self-centered insufferable manchild who only ever thought about himself. He has a victim complex a mile wide despite the fact that the affair was his fault. Adam never takes any responsibility for his mistakes to the point that by the 75% mark, I was rooting for him to get the death penalty. 

 

Despite the fact that these characters are supposed to be rational functioning adults with careers and working frontal lobes, none of these characters acted like professionals (or even like real people). The dialogue was juvenile and filled with snarky comments and sarcastic quips (AKA how no one actually talks in real life). The amount of random out-of-place physical violence/violent daydreams really broke my suspension of disbelief. In all of her books I've read so far, Jeneva Rose has written the same two POV characters in all of her books: the stick-up-her-ass girlboss FMC and the entitled manchild MMC. Clearly, the formula is not working.

 

Overall, this book is the perfect storm of my least favorite thriller plot devices.

The wife getting revenge on her cheating husband trope is SO overdone, so it was kind of a letdown that this was the big twist. Comparing The Perfect Marriage to Gone Girl is like comparing a middle school play to a broadway performance. Gone Girl did this trope so well that everything else pales in comparison. Additionally, this book contains my least favorite thriller plot device: when one of the POV characters hides their own thoughts from themselves in order for the final plot twist to work. After reading 100+ pages from Sarah’s first-person POV, it is entirely unrealistic Sarah’s internal monologue to contain no evidence of her involvement in the crime.

 

It is unfortunate, because somewhere buried in the terrible writing, inconsistent characterization, and inane plot twists, the premise of this book was actually very interesting.