A seems-too-good-to-be-true romance sets in motion Adele Parks's juicy and contemplative First Wife's Shadow, a thriller that's ready-made for a celebrity book club selection and the ensuing miniseries treatment.
Forty-seven-year-old Emma Westly is the CEO of a British wind-harvesting company. At a conference where she's making a speech, she meets Matthew Charlton, a hunky freelance photographer a decade her junior. They flirt and chat, and Emma learns that Matthew's wife died the previous year. Emma and Matthew start dating, and a few months in, her friends think it's odd that he still hasn't shown her his flat or introduced her to his social circle; a smitten Emma remains unfazed because "the rom-com vibe is there in all its glory." Her only problem is that her home keeps getting vandalized. It doesn't seem logistically possible for Matthew to have done the damage, so he can't be to blame... can he?
This may sound like a plot that relies on the protagonist's stupidity at the expense of readers' patience, but Emma is savvy and given to mulling over things like the double standard that says men should be older and better earners than their female partners--in other words, she's a feisty, fully formed character. Across the span of First Wife's Shadow, Parks (Woman Last Seen; Two Dead Wives) gets in three and a half good gotchas (she was going for four, but readers may guess the last one). That's quite the rate of return on readers' investment. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer