The Marriage Lie by Kimberly Belle

OOPS! With all the preparations, enjoyment, and cleanup from Christmas, I neglected to post a book. This was the December selection for the Gables BC and although it was an easy read, it did elicit much discussion. The premise is a common one - do you really know who your spouse is?

Will and Iris Griffith have what seems to be the perfect marriage. The novel opens with Will giving Iris a very beautiful and expensive Cartier ring to celebrate an anniversary and her anticipated pregnancy. Will is off to present at a cybersecurity conference in Orlando and Iris to her job as a school psychologist. But then the unthinkable happens, an airplane crash brings news to Iris that her husband was on the plane that crashed en route to Seattle. Startled at the news and even more puzzled Iris denies vehemently that her husband was on that plane and there had to be a mistake. She digs out the brochure for the conference and calls the hotel venue in Orlando only to find that the conference is totally fictional. 

From this point the suspense builds as Iris finds a newly written life insurance policy for $2.5 million.  The reader begins to get a very uneasy feeling when Iris meets with the airline representatives and questions so many of their actions. With her parents and brother in town, she embarks on a serious fact-finding expedition that takes her to Seattle. Was her husband having an affair? Did he have another family in the Seattle area? What was the connection since Will was from Tennessee, or was he? She and her brother Dave set out to the west coast to find out

At the community memorial service for the victims, she meets Corban, a friend of Will's that he met a the gym. Corban insinuates himself into Iris' life as a friend and one who wants to help her work through her grief. And then strange occurrences happen - Will's briefcase is found (how did it survive the crash?), she begins to receive phone calls from unidentified numbers, and then texts. She is pushed to investigate them all despite being cautioned by her new found friend, protectorate, and lawyer, who lost his wife and daughter in the plane crash.

The Marriage Lie is suspense filled and a page turner. Although parts of it were predictable, there were other parts that left me stumped until the end when the answers are revealed. For the most part the characters were well delineated and the plot tight. I do question what happened to Iris' parents and brother who played such an integral role in the first part of the novel and why Iris, being trained as a psychologist, couldn't see through the lies and stories of not only her husband, but of some of his friends. But a good read for a winter's snowy day.