Angela Mullen was a caterer at the Hamptons when she meets NYU economics professor Jason Powell, who surprises her by enthusiastically courting her, marrying her, and bringing her and her son Spencer to live in Manhattan, where their financial situation improves stratospherically when Jason writes a pop-economics volume that becomes a runaway bestseller. The story jumps off when Burke – with a not-particularly-suppressed authorial glee – takes a storybook marriage and proceeds to fritter it apart like a wilting and despised New Year's Christmas Tree.

By the end of the book, they'll be hoping even the 13-year-old kid somehow gets the electric chair. And readers who finished The Ex wondering if Burke could manage yet again to write an entire book in which all of the main characters were thoroughly, deeply unlikable will be – well, maybe not pleased? But surely intrigued? – to know that at no point in The Wife will they be even remotely tempted to like any of the characters who keep the plot moving. Readers who were kept eagerly turning pages by Burke's thriller-writing expertise will likewise be pleased to know that their author hasn't lost a single step: apart from a slightly querulous opening couple of pages, The Wife is a perfectly-choreographed sequence of plot twists designed to make it virtually impossible to stop reading.

Readers who enjoyed Alafair Burke's 2016 crime-thriller The Ex for its sharply-drawn main character, hard-fighting high-profile trial attorney Olivia Randall will be pleased to know that she makes a return appearance in Burke's new book, The Wife.

The ex alafair burke summary