When Abbie and her three friends head down to the south of France for a girl's break, without their husbands, it seems a little bit of harmless fun. The fun soon turns into a horror story as Abbie finds herself incarcerated in a French jail accused of a heinous murder, which she did not commit. Because of the importance of her supposed victim, Abbie finds it impossible to get anyone to listen to her side of the story, as a moment’s dalliance looks to cost her freedom...

Guilty Wives is a new thriller by James Patterson, a prolific and officially the highest paid author for the last year. This novel was written with David Ellis.

I don’t remember ever reading one of Patterson’s books, although in the course of my life I have read similar novels, particularly Harold Robins, who likewise produced works which mixed sex and melodrama.

The novel is told from Abbie's point of view and as we meet her for the first time she is in jail, being looked after by a sadistic jailer. At this point we are aware that Abbie believes herself to be innocent of murder, although Patterson avoids telling us just who it was she is supposed to have killed. So, the story skips back thirteen months to the wives arriving in the south of France. As people are wont to do when separated from their husbands, the ladies go a little off the rails, ending up on a yacht where the murder take place.

The book inhabits that same region where Dallas used to exist, where virtually everyone involved are both rich and attractive. We do so love seeing the rich having a bad day. The book is structured with incredibly short chapters, in a page count of four hundred and twenty-four, there is an amazing one hundred and forty-three chapters. Many, if not most, are only two and a half pages long, ideal for short trips on trains and buses. It feels quite contrived, as if the book was created as a product rather than the fiction being the foremost reason for its existence.

Although I did warm to Abbie as a character the premise of the book was preposterous and the real guilty party was obvious from a very early point, leaving an awful lot of chapters for Abbie to come to the same conclusion. I’ll not say who did the deed, in case you want to enjoy the novel, but the twist did not seem logical or even likely.

On the plus side the book is slickly written and once Abbie gets into prison the up tempo pace is well maintained. It is a very easy read and probably the sort of book to take on holiday, when you can’t be asked to think and just want to be entertained.

6

Charles Packer