"The Husband’s Secret” by Liane Moriarty – Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Cecilia Fitzpatrick is living a relatively normal life, having three charming daughters, a husband with whom she has been living for fifteen years, and being the P&C President of a very successful Tupperware company.

One day though, she stumbles upon a post-mortem letter written by her husband over fifteen years ago, right after the birth of their first child, and its contents turn her world upside down.

Tess is the second protagonist of the story, and her life is in even greater turmoil as she tries to find refuge in her childhood home once her husband confesses that he is in love with her cousin, business partner and best friend.

The last protagonist of the story, Rachel, is haunted by the murder of her teenage daughter around twenty years ago, and with her family moving away to New York, she decides to get in touch once again with the man she believes to be her daughter’s killer, a regular school secretary.

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty is certainly a very ambitious novel, bringing to us three dark stories which, as the story progresses, grow closer and closer. At first, what relates the three women isn’t necessarily apparent, but the letter written by the first husband, Jon-Paul, ends up being the catalyst that brings their lives together.

This makes for a very exciting book where there is seldom a dull moment, whether we are taken into the crumbling mind of Tess or are trying to find a killer as Rachel.

One of the greatest feats Moriarty managed to accomplish in her book, in my opinion, is intricately crafting all of her characters, giving them numerous layers of depth and avoiding cookie-cutter stereotypes.

Every character (at least every one that matters) is meticulously presented, from their physical appearance all the way to the routine they follow in their everyday lives. This approach makes some of the characters feel very real, relatable and even familiar to a certain extent, and the deeper you get into the story, the more fleshed out they become.

As you can guess, Liane Moriarty uses The Husband’s Secret not only to tell a complex story, but also to explore some heavy themes, mainly revolving around our perception of guilt, the necessity of punishment or vengeance, if real justice can ever be achieved, and how each one of us is to find his/her own redemption.

In the end, it makes for a very entertaining and thought-provoking novel that only leaves me wondering in excitement as to what Moriarty is going to come up with next.

Considering that this novel is hard to classify in one single category, I recommend it to anyone who prefers books of a more intellectual nature and is looking for something more than just entertainment.

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Liane Moriarty Personal site Liane Moriarty is an Australian author, just like her sister, Jaclyn Moriarty. Before getting into the freelance writing business she worked in advertising and marketing and even ran her own company in the domain. It was in 2004, after earning her masters degree at Macquarie University and publishing her first novel, Three Wishes, that Moriarty began her career as an author.