Book Review: "The Woman From Book Club" by Carrie Hughes

So I have something to admit: I actually do really enjoy the typical 'female' novel. You know what they entail: crimes, cheating husbands, quirky black comedy and stock characters such as 'pick me' types and 'plain Jane' figures. The Woman From Book Club was recommended to me via Amazon and so I read a bit of it at first, thinking not a lot of it. Perhaps an hour or so later, I found myself thinking about the book again and before you know it, it appeared on my Kindle. Yes, I bought the book. And I read it in one day. That last part may not be surprising but this book was definitely one of those that you simply cannot put down.

The book starts with a weird turn - the 'Plain Jane' Emma is arrested for conspiracy to commit murder whilst she is sat in her book club with a bunch of rich-wife friends. Emma is the quiet, shy and bookish type. She's married to a famed divorce lawyer to the stars named Elliot and she has a twin named Jules. Her two daughters, Isabella and Chloe are teenagers with, as she states "expensive taste". One day, Elliot turns up dead from a fall down the stairs and the new girlfriend, Lydia - homewrecker - is arrested on suspicion of murder. But both of these women don't like each other, though they pretend to.

So, why have they both been arrested for the murder of the man who cheated on one with the other? Carrie Hughes weaves a strange story filled with whispers, admissions and hidden microphones, written in diary entries and alternating narratives which take us all the way to several weeks before the meeting when a girl called Lydia walks into a Tennis Club to find a razor-sharp Jules sitting behind the till. And we get to watch it snowball...

From the first instance, we see Lydia's taking of Emma's husband. She plans it from the very beginning, believing she was entitled to a rich husband to look after her, she comes from humble beginnings. Jules asks Lydia to come to the rich woman's book club and there is where she meets Emma.

Once Emma is met, there is a coveting of her husband. Carrie Hughes writes Lydia as a disgusting figure - someone we are met to hate so much that we forget to look at the small hints and clues along the way. But once she has got what she wanted - Elliot kicks out Emma and stays with Lydia. But then Lydia is arrested when Elliot is found murdered. Yes, it was a fall down the stairs, but the other injuries confront Lydia with the truth - she murdered him. Or did she?

When we see Emma, we see a woman who relies on her book club for socialising. We see her twin, Jules who is the loud-mouth one who tells Emma the truth about her life. Unfortunately, this means that Lydia getting involved seems to twist everything - but not for the rich book club women. Carrie Hughes purposefully leads us into the web of lies woven by these rich women where we get to learn more about the class divide, the strange surveillance of the whole thing and the way they always (and I mean always) have each other's backs. Even in the worst case scenarios.

But then, the whole thing starts to unravel. Even the things we thought weren't possible seep through the cracks and the truth shows its head. I don't want to tell you too much about this book but it is absolutely brilliantly planned out. There is the seen truth, the possible truth and the real truth - and it's that last one that keeps coming up over and over again. The one that only few know about.

Carrie Hughes weaves this novel in an incredible way, shifting the focus and the lens as we go. We get tastes of the distant past, flavours of husbands already dead and police involvement at a scale that screams 'abuse of power'. This is a fantastic book that I haven't seen a lot of raving over, but definitely deserves its place out there in the open. It is a wicked, dark and thrilling novel.