As Long as We Both Shall Live
by JoAnn Chaney
You can’t be married to someone without sometimes wanting to kill them...
As Long As We Both Shall Live is JoAnn Chaney’s wicked, masterful examination of a marriage gone very wrong, a marriage with lots of secrets…
“My wife! I think she’s dead!” Matt frantically tells park rangers that he and his wife, Marie, were hiking when she fell off a cliff into the raging river below. They start a search, but they aren’t hopeful: no one could have survived that fall. It was a tragic accident.
But Matt’s first wife also died in suspicious circumstances. And when the police pull a body out of the river, they have a lot more questions for Matt.
Detectives Loren and Spengler want to know if Matt is a grieving, twice-unlucky husband or a cold-blooded murderer. They dig into the couple’s lives to see what they can unearth. And they find that love’s got teeth, it’s got claws, and once it hitches you to a person, it’s tough to rip yourself free.
So what happens when you’re done making it work?
Momma Says: 3 stars⭐⭐⭐
When I read the blurb for this one, I expected a gripping psychological/domestic thriller. In fact, that's what I was hoping for, and the opening lines and first handful of chapters set the stage for exactly that. The book does deliver in the domestic thriller genre in part. There are some terrific twists in Matt and Marie's story, but it felt like this one couldn't decide what it wanted to be. From the time our detectives are introduced, it becomes more procedural than thriller, and there's nothing wrong with that except a large chunk of the book is weighed down by Loren's backstory. His history is interesting enough, but it felt out of place, almost like two separate books thrown in a bowl and mixed together. With the bouncing back and forth, what had the potential to be the gripping thriller I was hoping for lost its edge. Tightened up and trimmed down, As Long as We Both Shall Live has everything needed for a great thriller. As it stands, it was just an okay read for me.
❃❃ARC provided by NetGalley and Flatiron Books
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