Long story (and many hours of argument) short: he wouldn’t, I would. I was immediately in my own husband’s ear, asking if he’d open the envelope in those circumstances. So, back to THE LETTER! Reading the opening chapters of The Husband’s Secret triggered an intense debate in my household. I just wanted to get back to the letter, dammit, not hear about the love lives and murders of these other randoms! teacher, Connor (who is, coincidentally, Tess’s ex-boyfriend), is the man responsible for the murder of her daughter thirty-odd years ago.ĭo you see why it was confusing at first? I mean, the paths all eventually cross and Moriarty pieces it all together like a jigsaw puzzle, but I wasn’t a huge fan of that initial confusion. And then there’s Rachel, the school secretary she suspects that the P.E. She enrols her kid in the same school that Cecilia’s kids attend.

Tess, it turns out, is a career-woman who returns to Sydney with her son after she finds out that her husband and her cousin are “in love” (they’re not even shagging, can you believe it, they just sit her down one night and tell her they love each other – vomit!). Her life looks pretty perfect from the outside, until she finds that envelope-shaped cat among the pigeons. The Husband’s Secret is set in Sydney, where Cecilia – the woman who finds the envelope – is an (otherwise) happily married mother-of-three. It wasn’t until their storylines began to merge and intersect that things finally started making sense again… None of them seemed particularly three-dimensional, and they all had generic white-people names: Rachel. My brain was whirring, I was dying of curiosity, convinced this book was a winner… but then, in chapters two and three, we almost inexplicably started bouncing around in the lives (and, later, timelines) of a bunch of other characters. I think it goes without saying that, given that this is how the story begins, the opening chapter is an absolute cracker. But her husband is still very much alive, and he won’t tell her what’s inside. Jumping right in, The Husband’s Secret has one HECK of a premise! A woman finds an envelope, written in her husband’s hand, and it says (*ominous music*): “For my wife, only to be opened in the event of my death”.

The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty