Review: Michele Campbell's IT'S ALWAYS THE HUSBAND

The Need to Know: It’s Always the Husband was like candy to me: a delicious treat that I quickly gobbled up.

Last weekend I raced through Michele Campbell’s It’s Always the Husband, a compelling, dramatic mystery that reminds me so much of one of my favorite shows, How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM). Like HTGAWM, It’s Always the Husband focuses on a small group of friends who attend a private school together. Booze, drugs, sex, and drama abound.
 
Also like HTGAWM, eventually the characters in It’s Always the Husband find themselves confronting something much darker than the jealousies, insecurities, and resentments that underlie their friendship.
 
Murder.
 
In It’s Always the Husband, Aubrey, Jenny, and the beautiful, charismatic Kate don’t have a perfect friendship. But they’re college freshmen roommates, and they’re the closest friends each of them have. 

Fast forward twenty-two years later, and now Kate is dead. Who did it? And why?
 
Campbell does an excellent job of using flashbacks to illuminate her characters’ deepest motivations and desires. These are characters that I didn’t feel protective of or emotionally drawn to, but layered, complicated characters who, at their core, want something more than acceptance: an acknowledgement of their superiority.
 
Even more important in terms of this murder-mystery plot, Campbell’s ability to hold these various threads of the story together so skillfully means that the reader has suspicions about what happened to Kate and why, but no real certainty until the book’s last pages. As Campbell suggests through her portrayal of Aubrey, Jenny, and Kate and their dangerous friendship, any number of characters might have had motive—to use the police vocab—to kill Kate.
 
If you’re in the mood for a moody, dramatic murder-mystery that’s centered on a rich portrayal of a female friendship, check out It’s Always the Husband.
 
**I received a complimentary copy of Michele Campbell’s It’s Always the Husband from SheSpeaks but all opinions included here are my own. This book will be released on 05/16/17 and is available for pre-order today.