THE SENATOR'S WIFE

A domestic thriller set among the Washington, D.C., in crowd starts with a bang.

Sen. Robert Chase and his wife, Sloane, have their beach weekend ruined by their friends Sen. Whit Montgomery and his screaming wife, Peg, who is convinced Whit is cheating on her. Two weeks later, Peg shoots Robert and herself as Whit stands helplessly by. The widowed partners eventually fall into each other's arms, raising eyebrows when they marry. With that whirlwind of belief-challenging events out of the way in the first few pages, the real story gets going. Sloane, who has lupus, is finally scheduling her hip replacement. A shady but stunningly attractive home health care worker named Athena is hired to live in for the first few weeks; she immediately begins snooping and controlling Sloane's medication. Meanwhile, Whit may still be tomcatting around and looks to be involved in some shady schemes of his own, including gaining control of Sloane's very well-endowed foundation. Some thriller fans are not super picky about writing—wooden dialogue and stereotyped characters can be forgiven if the twists are twisty enough. The sisters who write under the pen name Liv Constantine will have to count on that this time around, since not only is some of the dialogue and several of the characters laugh-out-loud ridiculous—the raunchy gold-digger sex kitten really takes the cake—but the most serious attempts at realism in the book involve granular detail on lupus and its treatment as well as fun facts about the White House and elite designer brand names. As for the main twist, it relies rather heavily on the omniscient third-person narrator misleading the reader and concealing information to a degree that could almost be seen as cheating. On the other hand, they did fool this reader, and the reveal scene was gaspworthy.

Not for the picky.