A Good Marriage

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Author: Kimberly McCreight

Published: May 5, 2020

Pages: 400

For fans of: Suspense, Mysteries, Slow-burn Thrillers, books like The Girl on the Train, Big Little Lies, Presumed Innocent, who-done-it plots

Good to know: mentions of child sexual abuse, different POV’s, story switches between past and present time lines

This was one of my June Book of the Month picks (click on the link to save on a subscription while I get a free book credit :))

Disclaimer: I was not paid for this review, and all opinions are my own. If you are interested in purchasing this book, please consider using my Amazon affiliate link (by clicking on the top or bottom pictures) and helping a fellow book blogger out 🙂 I will receive a small fee from Amazon, but your book will still cost the same.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Big Little Lies meets Presumed Innocent in this riveting novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia, in which a woman’s brutal murder reveals the perilous compromises some couples make—and the secrets they keep—in order to stay together.

Lizzie Kitsakis is working late when she gets the call. Grueling hours are standard at elite law firms like Young & Crane, but they’d be easier to swallow if Lizzie was there voluntarily. Until recently, she’d been a happily underpaid federal prosecutor. That job and her brilliant, devoted husband Sam—she had everything she’d ever wanted. And then, suddenly, it all fell apart.

No. That’s a lie. It wasn’t sudden, was it? Long ago the cracks in Lizzie’s marriage had started to show. She was just good at averting her eyes.

The last thing Lizzie needs right now is a call from an inmate at Rikers asking for help—even if Zach Grayson is an old friend. But Zach is desperate: his wife, Amanda, has been found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their Brooklyn brownstone. And Zach’s the primary suspect.

As Lizzie is drawn into the dark heart of idyllic Park Slope, she learns that Zach and Amanda weren’t what they seemed—and that their friends, a close-knit group of fellow parents at the exclusive Grace Hall private school, might be protecting troubling secrets of their own. In the end, she’s left wondering not only whether her own marriage can be saved, but what it means to have a good marriage in the first place.

My Review:

The worst part of marriage was the way somebody else’s problems became your own”

This is a slow-burn Thriller, meaning it took seventy percent of the book for everything to start coming together and the pace to pick up. I don’t particularly enjoy books about trials, or when the legal aspects take over the plot, but I did feel like the court documents and transcripts included were necessary to the story. The legal jargon and court preparation did get a bit bothersome at times, and this is probably why the story was so slow to develop.

Success is an abstraction only to rich people”

This book was full of unlikeable characters. Both of the main female characters, Amanda and Lizzie, made multiple reckless and impulsive decisions just to get a rise out of their husbands or to get their attention. The only character I actually liked was Sebe, one of the side character’s husbands, and Millie, the detective who helps Lizzie. My list of suspects was constantly changing, and by the end I still was not one hundred percent sure who the killer was. There were some major plot twists, which I really enjoyed. I highly recommend this book to all Mystery/Thriller fans.