A Deadly Marriage
It was common knowledge that David and Catalina Plesence's marriage was on the verge of collapse. And nearly everyone knew David was seeing a lot of an attractive widow living nearby. David longed for a divorce, but Catalina had other plans. She adamantly refused to contemplate the idea: though she was prepared to obtain a judicial separation — provided the alimony was large enough. When a man died after having had a drink in their house, the police establish that it was the work of poison and start looking to Catalina and David for answers. Catalina finally sees her chance to exact terrible revenge against David. She claims that the poison had been meant for her and that David had tried to kill her… But who is the real murderer? And will Catalina’s allegation be held as truth? Either way, their marriage is surely over… A Deadly Marriage is a classic murder mystery from a master of the genre.
This book frustrated me quite a bit. It has a great skeleton in that the framework for an interesting plot is here, there are some complex characters with intriguing motivations, a relatively good pace and it all accumulates to create the perfect conclusion for this story.
However….
The writing isn’t very good, it becomes predictable making it hard to retain interest, you’re able to figure out the murderer fairly quickly in the first part of the book, the dialogue sounds stilted and almost childlike, page and story breaks aren’t very well delineated so sometimes it gets confusing as completely different plot points just run into each other and even though the conclusion is good for the story line it ends abruptly.
I felt this had so much potential but ultimately failed on pulling it together. I think the author would have pulled this off better if he had a partner that could do the actual writing while Jeffries came up with an outline kind of like what James Patterson does.
Thank you to Netgalley and Endeavor Press for allowing me to review this book.
*synopsis and pic from netgalley.com