The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives by Elizabeth Arnott: ‘She may be pretty, but pretty doesn’t keep you alive’  

Elizabeth Arnott’s The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives caught my eye on NetGalley with its arresting cover, but it was its 1960s California setting that swung it for me together with a mention of Mad Men in the blurb. It has an interesting premise, too: three women, all once married to convicted serial killers, are appalled at the lack of police interest in the murder of a young woman and decide to set about investigating it themselves.

We’re not simpering wives. We learned the truth; we got mad; we moved on.

Beverly has agreed to appear at gala alongside the police chief in charge of the investigation which ended her ex-husband’s killing spree five years ago. Proceedings are interrupted by news of another grizzly murder, news which Beverley shares with Margot and Elsie. Once the wife of a politician, Margot took evidence of his heinous crimes to the police while Elsie made a horrible discovery in her own home. When another body turns up, the three women are disgusted by continued police indifference, setting about their own investigations. Beverly has an inside track through a detective involved in her ex’s conviction with who she’s having an affair while Elsie teams up with new female crime reporter at work and Margot uses her contacts some of whom are distinctly sleazy. After several dead ends and quite a few red herrings, the women manage to solve the crime in the nick of time but not before four other women lose their lives.

She scans more articles, murderers allotted paragraph upon paragraph while their victims are sidelined to passing whispers of acknowledgement.

Arnott’s debut switches perspectives between the three women interspersing their backstories with their investigations in a narrative full of atmospheric period detail. Each of them carries the burden of their husbands’ awful crimes made worse by society’s assumption of complicity, that surely they must have known. There are several smartly managed twists and turns before the denouement which I’d guessed but only a few pages before it was revealed. It’s an entertaining piece of crime fiction with an absorbing story but what makes it stand out is its emphasis on the public’s obsession with the killer rather than their victims who barely make the headlines, assumed to be asking for it or putting themselves in harm’s way. Given its period setting, it would be easy to dismiss that as no longer a problem but, sadly, I suspect that’s not the case.

Viking: London 9780241733622 208 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)