Kill Your Husbands by Jack Heath

Title: Kill Your Husbands

Author: Jack Heath

Genre: Crime

Publisher: Allen and Unwin

Published: 28^th November 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 384

Price: $32.99

Synopsis: A witty, page-turning, twisty whodunit from the bestselling author of the Hangman series, perfect for fans of Benjamin Stevenson.

Three couples, friends since high school, rent a luxurious house in the mountains for an unplugged weekend of drinking and bushwalking. No internet, no phones, no stress. On the first night, the topic of partner-swapping comes up. It’s a joke – at first.

Not everyone is keen, but an agreement is made. The lights will be turned out. The three women will go into the three bedrooms. The three men will each pick a room at random. It won’t be awkward later, because they won’t know who they’ve slept with – or can pretend they don’t.

But when the lights come back on, one of the men is dead. No one will admit to being his partner. The phones still don’t work, and now the car key is missing. They’re stranded. And the killer is just getting started …

~*~

Jack Heath is back with his fantastically creepy crime fiction. This time, it’s Kill Your Husbands – but don’t be fooled – his titles might seem simple on the surface, but there’s often something darker and more complex, and a little more misleading than meets the eye, and that is why his titles work so well. The provocativeness of them insinuates what might be behind the covers, and of course, there is always more to things than we might see on the surface.

Of course, Jack never fails to deliver a compelling story, and Kill Your Husbands is no exception. The story begins with three couples – Cole and Clementine, Isla and Oscar, Dom and Felicity heading away for a weekend in a remote house in the mountains – no phones, no Internet, a completely unplugged weekend, where one couple can forget about fertility issues, another can reconnect without worrying about parenthood, and the other can have fun. Things seem to be going well – but on the first night, they decide to swap partners, and it all goes downhill from there as they discover one of the men dead and nobody knows who was partnered with whom, and now with the phones not working and the car keys missing, everyone is trapped with a killer nearby. Everyone has a different version of events, and there’s also someone lurking nearby, taking the food, and making everyone feel uneasy.

Nothing Jack Heath includes in his novels is accidental. In Kill Your Husbands, he goes between two timelines – the present, about a week after the crimes take place, and the weekend that the crimes take place. In the second plot, the cop from Kill Your Brother, Kiara Lui is back, as is the protagonist Elise. Elise is still healing from her ordeal and trauma, and in a relationship with Kiara. Their story centres around time spent at the murder house as Kiara works on the investigation but also, tries to get Elise away to work through her trauma and find out what has been going on. These sections are told in third person present using Kiara and Elise’s perspectives and refer to the victims – the deceased and the survivors by their last names, whilst the other sections are told through the perspectives of Dom, Cole, Oscar, Felicity, Clementine, and Isla, and only use their first names. Jack has cleverly used this technique to work towards the reveal. It heightens the tension, ensuring that as a reader, you are constantly on edge trying to work out who is who, and which names go together. In writing the story in this way and going between the timelines and perspectives that linger on heart stopping cliff-hangers, Jack has kept the story moving so readers want to read on to find out who the killer is.

On the surface, one may think this book is a simple pact between wives who want to do away with their husbands. It’s not – it is a cleverly crafted book about a group of friends who are all connected through work, school, marriage, and the community they have built in Warrigal, and their secrets. Everyone it seems has motive to have killed the two men – but of course Jack Heath is way too clever for the obvious revenge plots to play out. He uses facts from the past and various items as clever red herrings that mislead even the best investigators, ensuring a case that is not necessarily straightforward. The layers are peeled back slowly – and nothing he puts into the novel is accidental or a coincidence, though it may feel like that at first – perhaps like a deliberate mislead. That is why it all works so well, because he knows how to throw readers off track and make them question what they think they know. It is the kind of book that you want to keep reading, and never put down. If you do, you are left wondering what has happened and I was desperate to get back to find out what happened – and for me, a Jack Heath book is always worth reading to uncover how he has crafted the plot and how he will reveal things at the end, something that he uses in his books for all ages, tempering the tension perfectly for the audience his book is aimed at, and that is what makes Kill Your Husbands work so well – the peaks and troughs, the tension, and the driving forces of the narrative that make the story work well.