SOMEONE ELSE'S HUSBAND

One woman’s death upends another woman’s world.

When Gretchen Falk and her husband, Richard, are awakened in the wee hours by police officers pounding on the door of their Upper East Side apartment, neither knows anything about why an up-and-coming artist named Frankie Callahan is dead—but it turns out that Richard knew Frankie fairly well, the two having met on a climbing expedition of Mount Kilimanjaro. The narration switches between Gretchen as her family copes with Richard’s arrest on murder charges and Frankie in the week before her death as she’s concerned about a man from her past; there are also scenes from the Kilimanjaro trip, which involved a tragic fall, as well as several interstitial musings from the point of view of an unidentified stalker. Much of what connects these characters has to do with American social class distinctions that are often played down; a good example would be the scene when the well-bred and wealthy Gretchen meets the poor-but-ambitious Richard at Dartmouth. There, they and their friends formed lifelong relationships, the kind where four guys wind up booking an expedition to climb a mountain together, trading jibes about past trips to places like the Dolomites and Patagonia. Richard, in his 50s, is co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs. His pals are Scotty (an attorney), Brooks (chief executive of his family’s firm), and Van (an entrepreneur). As the younger and less-privileged Frankie listens to them on Kilimanjaro, she becomes infatuated with Richard, who’s strikingly handsome and once harbored his own hopes of a life as an artist. Their bond grows during the ascent, especially after the aforementioned fall and their return to everyday life. That bond might have been more intriguing to examine than the reactions of the three Falk children to their father’s arrest, especially since the book’s denouement hinges on the darkest aspects of class consciousness.

The bestselling McCreight focuses on class tensions in a plot that doesn’t quite rise to the heights of her previous books.