Review: The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

Rating: ☆☆☆
Audience: Adult contemporary fiction, trigger subjects, violence, sex, language
Length: 416 pages
Author: Liane Moriarty
Publisher: Berkley
Release Date: March 3rd, 2015
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that is not meant to be read…

My darling Cecilia,
If you’re reading this, then I’ve died…

Imagine your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not only the life you have built together, but the lives of others as well. And then imagine that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive…

Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything—and not just for her. There are other women who barely know Cecilia—or each other—but they, too, are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX.

And apparently only that.

That’s about all I remember from this book honestly. And what made me even more sad about it was that it wasn’t romantic sex. It was just eh. Most of the characters were practically consumed by their sex life. I will be the first person to say I love a good love story, but not in this way. I’m not even sure what kind of story it was? Middle-class women with a lot of issues was about all I gathered.

Now those pieces are written well. The author gets that psyche down and each character was struggling with some tough issues. Murder, grief, depression, guilt, looming divorce, affairs of the heart, Mom-shame, and a lot more. 

This book has a lot happening at all times. Enough so that I flew through it, but was left with a bitter taste. The “epilogue” didn’t solve any problems, and left things kind of frazzled and somewhat open-ended (in my interpretation).

I will say, the ethics of this book got me thinking. What would happen if a letter like that had come into my life, ya know? It is a lot to contemplate, but the secret was seen from way over a mile away so take the story as you want.

Overall audience notes:

• Adult fiction mystery
• Language
• A lot more talking about sex than actual sex, but they’re some mild-detailed scenes
• Violence (murder, car wrecks)
• Trigger warnings: grief, depression, murder