Eliza´s world almost got broken into small little pieces as she received an anonymous photo of her dear husband, a career-oriented gentleman, together with another woman. He is her love and life and she wants to save her marriage above everything. A competent marriage therapist may be the best way to fix everything, but instead, it opens up a very dark box of revenge that instead of bringing up the couple together again, may lead to even darker places.
The Marriage Vendetta, the debut novel by Caroline Madden, is successfully going beyond the narrative that one may expect in such a story dynamics: stay-at-home unhappy mom and wife, freak-control successful man, a marriage based on an illusion of love. Instead, the psychological twists do add a different dimension to the story and definitely avoid the risk of the stereotype.
I particularly liked Eliza, once a successful concert piano player, a character with a special human sensitivity although partially blinded by love. The manipulative role of the psychologist and the games aimed apparently to punish Richard are very interesting to observe, but at least at the beginning hard to appreciate if they are necessary or not and especially if they will lead to anything better, at least from Eliza´s perspective.
The Marriage Vendetta is a very promising debut novel, on a topic that it´s always open to new interpretations and takes. The funniest of all is that there is actually an US-based infidelity expert psychologist with the same name as the author´s.
Rating: 4 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own
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