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Summary
Summary
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
"Be careful, Fran," the man said quietly. "About what you think you know."
In a dilapidated farmhouse out in the vast waterlogged plains of the English Fenlands, Fran awakes groggily to her baby's cries one February night and finds the bed empty beside her. Her husband, Nathan, is gone.
Moving uneasily through the drafty rooms, searching for her husband, Fran soon makes a devastating discovery that upends her marriage and any semblance of safety. As she tries desperately to make sense of what happened to Nathan, Fran is forced to delve dangerously into the undercurrents of his claustrophobic hometown and question how well she knew him in the first place. Fran, increasingly isolated, grows paranoid--but Nathan isn't the only one hiding something. Though she can't tell a soul, Fran is shielding a damning secret of her own: a hazy, dreamlike memory from the night of Nathan's disappearance that might be the key to it all.
From the bestselling author of The Crooked House comes an utterly gripping psychological thriller spanning the traditions of Daphne du Maurier and S. J. Watson. Christobel Kent's The Loving Husband is spooky and skillfully written, dragging readers deep into the unsettling world of the Fens and into a marriage of half-truths and past lives, where no one can be trusted--especially not your spouse.
Author Notes
Christobel Kent was born in London and grew up in London and Essex, including a stint on the Essex coast on a Thames barge with three siblings and four stepsiblings, before studying English at Cambridge. She has worked in publishing and as a TEFL teacher, and has lived in Italy, where she set several novels, including The Drowning River and A Murder in Tuscany . She lives in Cambridge with her husband and their five children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this engrossing psychological thriller set in rural England from Kent (The Crooked House), Fran Hall awakes early one winter morning to discover that her husband, Nathan, is missing from their bed. A search of their dilapidated farmhouse reveals nothing but the Halls' two young children. The door is unlocked and the mat is muddy, so Fran heads outside, where she finds Nathan's bloody corpse in a drainage ditch. As the murder investigation progresses, the police become increasingly suspicious of Fran. She starts to do some digging of her own, and it's not long before Fran realizes that she was married to a stranger. Skillfully integrated flashbacks permit both Fran and the reader to conduct a marital postmortem, and the harsh weather and isolated locale help amplify the tale's inherent tension. The plot features some clever twists, and though Kent doesn't fully earn her ending, she's crafted an emotionally charged mystery that will keep readers guessing until the final chapter. Agent: Victoria Hobbs, A.M. Heath (U.K.). (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A woman finds her husband dead behind their house and then realizes he was not at all the man she thought she knew in Kent's (The Crooked House, 2016, etc.) gripping domestic thriller.Fran and Nathan Hall have recently moved with their two young children to a farm near the small, run-down village in eastern England where Nathan grew up. Fran is aware of a growing tension in the marriage, exacerbated by her isolation as a stay-at-home mother and her husband's lack of sexual interest, but when she finds Nathan murdered one night, she has no idea what mysteries will surface during the investigation. Providing some flashbacks to explain how the two met and married, the novel focuses on Fran and her conflict with the provincial, misogynist local police as they try to get to the bottom of the matter. The mystery is a slow-burn but is startlingly effective at this pace. The gradual unfolding of truth allows Kent to also explore Fran's stages of grief, her perspective of a world turned completely upside down, first by murder, then by the faintly sinister investigators, and then by the power of the secrets in Nathan's life and in her own. Fran seems utterly, heartbreakingly alone in her loss and in her world, but she maintains a driving sense of self that becomes stronger in the face of adversity. The novel's other great strength is its raw, wild setting. The rough blankness of the landscape serves to emphasize the characters' struggles; this is no bucolic vision but a stark, depressing look at an insular rural area. While the plot, and even the characters, may sound borderline clich, there is something about Fran's complexity that sets this one apart and makes for a truly chilling, absorbing read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Hoping to create a simple, nature-filled childhood for their children, Nathan and Fran Hall leave London for Nathan's hometown, Cold Fen. But when Fran discovers Nathan's body in a ditch on their remote farm, the natural beauty shifts into a frightening new landscape. In shock, Fran realizes how isolated Nathan has kept her when she can't answer detectives' questions about Nathan's job, his past, or his local acquaintances. Smug, cunning lead detective DS Gerard targets Fran as Nathan's murderer, and her only ally is Family Liaison Officer Ali Compton, whom Gerard has sidelined from the start. As frightened as she is of the farmhouse's creaking emptiness, Fran knows that staying put and unveiling Nathan's past is the only way to tempt his killer into making a mistake. Kent (The Crooked House, 2016) intensifies Fran's alienation with a steadily darkening atmosphere and foreboding sense of place that cleverly disguises red herrings. A creepy, addictive read for fans of S. J. Watson's Before I Go to Sleep (2011) and Clare Mackintosh's I Let You Go (2016).--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN SHE'S writing about her beloved Venice, Donna Leon can do no wrong. And earthly REMAINS (Atlantic Monthly, $25), her new mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, is one of her best. It's also one of her saddest, dealing as it does with the seemingly unstoppable polluting of the great lagoon. "We've poisoned it all, killed it all," mourns Davide Casati, the aged caretaker of the house on the island of Sant'Erasmo where Brunetti is taking a medical leave for job-induced stress. Casati is a wonderful character. (This would seem to make him doomed to die, but you never know.) An authentic boatman who built his own puparin, a graceful, gondola-like rowing boat that makes Brunetti swoon, Casati loves every watery inch of his domain. He's familiar with each nook and canal, and he even raises bees. It's the bees that give the book both its plot and its heart. "Man's turned against them," the boatman says, referring to the human and industrial waste that's poisoning their habitat. The death of the bees reverberates through the story, a warning to all. An ardent classicist who anticipates long stretches of boredom on his enforced vacation, Brunetti has packed plenty of reading matter: Pliny, Herodotus, Euripides and that avid gossip, Suetonius. Instead, he puts himself in Casati's hands. He rows with him, goes swimming with him, and soaks up his knowledge of the vast lagoon and its floating spits of land. He learns about "bees and fish and birds, and how to build a boat, and how to navigate by the stars." But when murder enters the story, as it must, Brunetti remembers that he's a cop and opens an investigation. "The islands are small places," he declares, "and there are no secrets." Before tragedy strikes, this conscientious cop is the happiest we've ever seen him in this socially aware and intensely felt series. But when he calls his wife and tries to describe his experiences, "Brunetti knew that, no matter how much he babbled, he was incapable of conveying the magic of the scene." Leon dares to try, once again earning the gratitude of her devoted readers. IF LANDSCAPES COULD kill, the English Fenland would surely be high on the suspect list. Fran Hall never wanted to move to the "flat, watery, abandoned" place that Christobel Kent describes so severely in her domestic thriller THE LOVING HUSBAND (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27). But Fran's husband, Nathan, who grew up in this forbidding terrain, made the decision for her; and before she knew it, she had given up her job in London and was hanging blackout curtains to screen her view of its sinister scenery. Imagine her horror, then, when she finds Nathan dead in a ditch, stabbed with one of their kitchen knives. Kent is a champion plotter, using well-placed flashbacks to find interesting characters who might reveal the real Nathan to a wife who hadn't known her enigmatic mate very well. (If he wasn't spending his cherished one or two nights a week at the pub, where was he going?) But when an old friend of Nathan's does turn up, he accuses Fran of the murder. The novel's slow-building resolution comes silently, engulfing you like quicksand. "THIS IS A dangerous country," a character in Jorgen Brekke's chilly thriller the fifth element (Minotaur, $26.99) says of Norway. "Not everyone can stand as much silence as they have here." Factor in the incessant snowstorms and the vast arctic forests and it's a wonder that Odd Singsaker, a police inspector in the cathedral city of Trondheim, doesn't have more homicides (and suicides) to contend with. Singsaker is actually more concerned about his alcoholic wife, Felicia, who went on a bender, failed to catch her flight home from Oslo and is now missing. The search for Felicia is soon buried under additional plot layers. A book collector is murdered and his young son kidnapped. A couple of students steal a dope dealer's stash. After choking a marijuana grower by forcing him to eat an entire batch of cannabis brownies, a philosophical killer ponders the existence of evil. In Steven T. Murray's translation, it's all very entertaining, but the mash-up of these plots with Felicia's disappearance proves to be a stretch too far. BERNIE GUNTHER IS living on the Riviera, working as a hotel concierge when Prussian blue (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27) opens in 1956. Philip Kerr's unorthodox German hero, who survived World War II as a Berlin hotel detective, revisits his past in flashbacks to 1939, when he was a cop on the Murder Commission, and not a very popular one at that. In 1956, with his hotel closed for the winter, Bernie is strongarmed by Gen. Erich Mielke, the deputy head of the East German Stasi, into finding and eliminating a female agent who's now too dangerous to remain alive. But in an unlucky turnabout, Bernie the hunter becomes Bernie the prey as this chase merges in his mind with one from before the war, in which he was fed amphetamines while tracking a murderer who fouled the mountain retreat where Hitler was soon to celebrate his birthday. Even on a dope binge, Bernie is still one of the most appealing detectives in the field. ? MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Library Journal Review
Fran heard her husband, Nathan, come to bed that night, but when she woke up in the morning, he was nowhere to be found. Moving past her infant son and four-year-old daughter, Fran is compelled to look outside, where she finds Nathan's body in a ditch on their farmhouse property. She has no idea what happened and no concrete knowledge of the events that precipitated Nathan's death. Now alone and still living in Nathan's small hometown, Fran feels out of place and uncomfortable. She's learning unsettling things about her late husband and struggling with what she "thinks" she remembers about the night of his death. Shifting between the past and present, Kent's narrative flows well, although the section transitions could have been smoother. Still, that won't deter readers' interest in discovering the truth about Fran and Nathan. Verdict Kent's (The Crooked House) psychological thriller is reminiscent of B.A. Paris's Behind Closed Doors, which is a more exciting example of stories in this subgenre (a wife realizes she doesn't actually know the man she married). Readers who enjoy Fiona Barton and Shari Lapena may want to try this title.-Nicole A. Cooke, GSLIS, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.