A dark comedy about four women coming together to heal the damage their husbands have done––and hide their bodies once they’ve killed them
When Sally kills her husband with a cast-iron skillet, she’s more fearful of losing her kids than of disposing of a fresh corpse. That just wouldn’t be fair—not after twenty years of marriage to a truly terrible man. But Sally isn’t the only woman in town reaching the brink. Soon, Sally finds herself leading an extremely unusual self-help group, and among them there are four bodies to hide. Can they all figure out the perfect way to bury their husbands . . . and get away with it?
First to join is former nurse, Ruth, who met her husband as a single mom. Now her son is grown and her husband’s violence builds by the day until an attack on the stairs leads to a fatal accident—for him. A few doors down, Samira’s last straw comes when she discovers her husband is planning a campaign of violence against her eldest daughter, who has just come out. Janey, Sally’s best friend, has just had her first child at forty-two. Sleep-deprived Janey needs a hero to slay the monster in the fairy tales she whispers to her daughter each night . . . and as her husband’s violence escalates, it might just be her.
Together, fueled by righteous anger but tempered by a moral core, the four women must help each other work out a plan to get rid of their husbands for good. Along the way, Sally, Ruth, Samira and Janey rediscover old joys and embark on new passions in work, education, and life. Friendship and laughter really are the best medicine—and so is getting away with murder.
I will say when I first started reading I wasn’t sure I was going to love – or even understand – this one. We have Sally killing her husband with skillet, then meeting several other women, all who have coincidentally killed their husbands as well. So they team up together to figure out a way to dispose of the bodies without getting caught. I was thinking – how in the world would something like this actually happen, and then I finally read the synopsis and that this novel is classified as dark humor. The authors note does also point out that she knows it’s not the most realistic of plot points, but wanted to talk about a deeper subject while also making it humorous. And that’s when it clicked for me. The book is set during the Covid quarantine – where you were afraid of your neighbors, opening the mail, simply stepping outside. The amount of violence against women in their domestic partnerships during that time spiked, so I came to appreciate what the story was really trying to show us. How women tried to protect themselves and their children during such a brutal time. While the characters go to extreme lengths in this book, it’s not that far off to imagine what so many women were going through during a period of self-isolation with their abusers. The ending definitely gave me an ah-ha, full circle moment with their nosy neighbor, and I ended up really enjoying the story and am glad I stuck with it. A thought-provoking read for the new year.
