November 20, 2014 / Leslie

Review: The Pocket Wife by Susan Crawford

The Pocket Wife
by Susan Crawford

Genre: Mystery
Publisher: William Morrow
Publish Date: March 17, 2015
Format: Hardcover | 384 pages
Rating: 4 of 5

From the Publisher

Dana Catrell is horrified to learn she was the last person to see her neighbor Celia alive. Suffering from a devastating mania, a result of her bipolar disorder, Dana finds that there are troubling holes in her memory, including what happened on the afternoon of Celia’s death. As evidence starts to point in her direction, Dana struggles to clear her name before her own demons win out.

About the Story

Dana’s neighbor and friend, Celia, has been murdered and Dana is a suspect. But Dana, who suffers from bipolar disorder, hasn’t been taking her medicine, resulting in manic episodes. And there are so many things now that she can’t remember.

For Dana, the day Celia died is all a blur. Could she have killed Celia? They had too much to drink that afternoon, and then there was an argument, and that photo – did Celia really show her a photo of her husband with another woman? And now the threatening notes – or did she write them to herself? Is someone lurking outside her house, watching her? Does someone want to kill her too?

My Thoughts

Using multiple points of view and written in the third person, the reader experiences both the confusion and jumbled thoughts of Dana, a very unreliable narrator, and Jack Moss, the level-headed detective assigned to solve the case. There are plenty of potential suspects and interesting characters including Dana’s unlikable and uncaring husband, a neighbor obsessed with his volunteer job as the head of the neighborhood watch, and even Celia’s own husband, to keep the pages turning on this fast-paced, tightly-framed mystery.

Multiple plot twists divert suspicion among the characters and keep the reader on edge. And although new information is routinely uncovered, we keep coming back to Dana in her manic, frenzied and confused state as she tries to remember what happened and make things clear in her clouded mind. The ending went in a direction I wasn’t expecting, but it was an acceptable twist in an enjoyable debut novel.

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Source: Review copy provided by the publisher and Amazon Vine.
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