My Darling Husband by Kimberly Belle

My Darling Husband by Kimberly Belle

Published by Park Row on March 8, 2022 ISBN 9780778311560

Trade paperback, $16.99, 352 pages

In Kimberly Belle's newest thriller My Darling Husband, Jade's life, while hectic, is pretty good. Her husband Cam is one of Atlanta's most celebrated chefs, known as the Steak King of Atlanta. He owns several popular high-end restaurants, and they live in a McMansion in a wealthy neighborhood.

Jade spends her days shuttling her nine year-old daughter Beatrix, a possible violin prodigy, and six year-old son Baxter, a typical energetic little boy, between school and activities. One day they returned home to find a masked man with a gun in their garage.

Frightened, Jade offers to give him her SUV, her wallet, phone, anything, if he will just leave. But that is not what he wants. He moves them all into the house and instructs Jade to call Cam and tell him that if her doesn't bring a very specific large sum of money to him by 7pm, he will kill the family.

Cam is dealing with a disasterous fire in his most profitable restaurant when Jade calls him. Although he tells the man he can't get that much cash in that short a period of time, the man reiterates his threat to Jade and the children.

The masked man knows a lot about Jade's husband, and tells her that her husband isn't the successful, wonderful man she thinks he is. Jade has to use her wits to figure out who this man is and how to keep him from hurting her children. The action moves between Jade in the house and Cam racing to find enough money to save his family.

My Darling Husband is breakneck thriller that gets parents right where they live- the safety of their children's lives. Your heart will pound as you read, and you'll wrack your brain as you try to figure out along with Jade how this man knows so much about Jade and Cam.

This novel has all the makings of a great Lifetime thriller movie, I wouldn't be surprised to see it next year on my television screen. If domestic thrillers are your favorite reads, My Darling Husband should be next up on your list.

Thanks to Harlequin for putting me on their Fall 2021 Mystery & Thriller Blog Tour. 

Stranger in the Lake by Kimberly Belle

Stranger in the Lake by Kimberly Belle
Published by Park Row Books ISBN 9780778388104
Hardcover, $28.99, 336 pages

Kimberly Belle has staked out a claim writing domestic thrillers about troubled marriages, and her latest, Stranger in the Lake, fits that category well.

We meet Charlotte as she is heading to her husband's architecture office where she also works. Charlotte married Paul a few years after his first wife was found drowned under the dock next to their gleaming mansion.

Paul loved Katherine, but people in the small resort town gossiped that he must have had something to do with her death; after all, she was a competitive swimmer. How could she drown so close to the dock?

Charlotte is eleven years younger than Paul, and she comes from the "wrong side of town", having grown up in the trailer park. Her father was in prison, and her mother was a drug addict who neglected Charlotte and her younger brother Chet.

People (including Paul's mother) also gossiped about "gold digger" Charlotte, digging her claws into the wealthy widower Paul. But Paul and Charlotte were in love, and hoped to start to a family soon.

After seeing Paul talking to a strange woman in town, Charlotte finds the woman's body the next day drowned under their dock. Two drowned women under his dock doesn't look good for Paul, and when he tells Charlotte that he must go away for three days after he lies to the police about meeting the dead woman, things go from bad to worse.

There are a lot of twists and turns in the story, and something that happened in Paul's past may have come back to haunt him. Back in high school, Paul was best friends with Jax and Micah, now Paul's neighbor. Jax went off the grid years ago, living in the woods, and Paul has helped him over the years by giving him money and clothes.

Did Paul kill the woman? Does he think Jax killed the woman, as the police suspect? Now that Charlotte has lied to the police to cover up for Paul's lie, she is determined to get to the truth.

Clever readers may be able to follow the breadcrumb clues as to who killed the woman, but there are so many layers to the book, the underlying elements to the story will keep the reader guessing why. Fans of books like The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl will want to add Stranger in the Lake to their summer reading list.

Thanks to Harlequin for putting me on their Summer Reads Blog Tour.