The main character spends the entire novel cheating on her husband, getting drunk, and not even bothering to mother her children and then at the end is rewarded for it???? There's NO CONSEQUENCES FOR HER ACTIONS. Her husband just, gets out of jail and returns to her and there's no discussion about her rampant cheating and ignoring him and their children while she goes off to another state to her have her affair and forcing her sister to be their mother instead. Instead it's all "oh we all live happily ever after now and I'm Super Good At Magic and we all live our happy lives all together, let's not mention the ugly details of my cheating and abandoning my children, ever."

Does he know? Is he aware how terrible his wife is, or will that come up some time in the future? She literally was about to let him rot in jail to go back to her highschool boyfriend, and if circumstances were just SLIGHTLY different, if he didn't decide to try to kill his wife and instead divorced her instead, she'd just have married him and moved on and never once questioned anything while letting her loving and caring husband rot in jail for a crime he didn't commit.

The epilogue should have resulted in him divorcing her and taking the children with him. She had absolutely no consequences for acting like an immature child the entire novel and forcing her sister to be the mother to both her and her children, or for ignoring her husband while he's in jail to the point that the LAWYER SHE HIRED HAS TO SHOW UP AT HER HOUSE UNANNOUNCED BECAUSE SHE WON'T TAKE HER CALLS.

Why does the detective like her? She's done nothing to earn her trust. What causes her to be like "I don't believe the husband did it, and somehow this unstable woman openly sleeping with the boyfriend she had when she was accused of ANOTHER drowning, is a good source of information and I trust her." What.

This book would have been 2 stars instead of 1 if the main character faced even ONE SINGLE CONSEQUENCE for her terrible actions. But instead she's rewarded for them.