Pretty Little Wife (2020)

The Replacement Wife (2021)

The Last Invitation (2022)

  

Darby Kane may not be destined to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature so don’t start reading her books with that expectation. (Although you never know.) What you can rely on when you read one of her books is that her books are just fun to read. Her domestic fiction is personal filled with betrayal by those who should love you the most and whom you should love without reservation. Anyone could be plotting against you from your wife to a husband, to family members, to friends. Many of her characters lack a moral compass to say the least. You may read her books and say this is too complex or too over the top and think that no one would act the way her characters act. At that point you turn on the news and some father just left his baby locked in a car while he went in to work for 8 hours. Or a women killed her kids because they were just too much trouble. Thousands of people gamble away their futures every day while living in a dream that they will get rich with this behavior. Let’s face it, people do crazy well in real life and Darby Kane does crazy well in her books (which is a lot less damaging).

The Engagement Party (2023)

I’ve read all of her books and enjoyed her form of domestic fiction with twisty plots and crazy actions. I hadn’t gotten around to her last book “The Engagement Party” and finally picked it up and got caught up in the crazy. Honestly who doesn’t know that when you go somewhere on vacation that only has one entrance and exit which is covered by water half the time that nothing good is going to come of that?

The vacation is organized as an engagement party where a group of old friends can get back together to celebrate one of their own getting engaged. The friends knew each other in college and experienced the horror of having on graduation weekend a student (Emily Hunt) go missing only to be found floating in a river. The police decide that the death was linked to another student who died by suicide and close the case.

Immediately you get the idea that these so-called friends are tied together by the secrets they have held and the lies they’ve told to hide those secrets since that incident in college. Even though 12 years have passed, the guilt and shame have not. It seems that more than one person wants this group to reveal the truth about Emily’s death and the trap is set on this isolated vacation hide out. Finding the truth isn’t easy and has to be forced out through threats, violence and death.

As tension ramps up in the book, the group finds a dead man in the trunk of a car with a note that says, “Time to tell the truth.” Of course, a storm covers the only road out with water leaving them stranded and wondering who will be the next to die and which one of them was driven to kill.

This book is just fun. There is a ton of tension and a constant desire to know exactly what is really going on. The characters are a mess of guilt and fear. They all have their own secrets and have told lies for so long that it seems impossible to tell the truth. On the surface, they see themselves as friends, but none of them really are friends.

There is no way the book couldn’t make you think about friendship and those we call friends. Many of our friends develop from shared experiences: we work together, we went to college together, we lived next door to each other, and so on. We may have a shared past, shared interests, shared experiences. We hope that our friends are people who love us and would have our backs in difficult times. Unfortunately, we have all been let down by friends and have let friends down. Friendship is complicated like all relationships. I would advise that if you have the kind of friends the people in this book have that you move across the county and block their number.

 

 What the Wife Knew (2024)

Darby Kane’s next book comes out December 10, 2024, and pre-pub reviews make it seem that this may be her best book so far.