"The Wife Swap" is an Interesting Idea Filled With Lackluster Execution

The Wife Swap by Jack Heath

Pages: 321 Genre: mystery thriller

Rating: 2.5 Star

Kindle Notes and Highlights

Three couples, made of friends from high school, decide to take a trip together to an isolated house in the mountains. It's supposed to be a fun weekend, until a plan to switch partners for the night turns dark. One of the husbands is dead, and with the lights off, no one knows who was the last person with him. Meanwhile, in the present timeline, Detective Kiara Lui is investigating this weekend of horrors, and nothing is quite like it seems.

I have conflicting feelings about this book. The initial murder weekend with the three couples was an engaging story (if not a little unbelievable), but a lot of the book took place in the "present" with Detective Kiara and her wife Elise as Kiara is trying to solve the mystery. The investigation was being handled really poorly, and she didn't actually discover anything: all the details were just revealed through the parts of the story that happened in the past. So, was it a bad book? No. But was it a good book? Also no.

The biggest problem with this book was the characters. I think the author was trying to make incredibly complex and nuanced characters, but I think that plan fell short. The men were horrible, gross, and violent misogynists. And then the women were ... kind of annoying. Maybe that was intentional (I believe when it was first released this book was called "Kill Your Husbands"), but it sort of just left a bad taste in my mouth and made it hard to root for them. It was also disappointing because there was no nuance left for the murderer; the reveal boiled down to "they're crazy!" The murder plot had a lot of potential, but it ended up feeling very unsatisfying.

The interpersonal relationships of the characters were also not as engaging as they should have been. Most of the mystery revolving around the original six characters involved the secrets kept between each other, but most of their chapters were inner monologues or recaps of moments we missed because we were in the mind of a different character. I wish we could've seen them interacting more to really feel why they did or didn't like each other instead of just being told.

The other two main characters, Kiara and her wife, Elise, were just in the wrong book. Their story is interesting but had nothing to do with this book. Kiara did barely any investigating (other than things she learned by happenstance), and Elise had an interesting backstory that was ultimately meaningless. I didn't care about it because there was nothing to care about, and it all just felt like a distraction from the actual plot.

The writing style was a little bizarre too. Kiara would refer to characters by their last name (Mr./Mrs. XYZ) until the "in the past" chapters caught up to a certain point, and then she would also refer to them as their first names. This could've been a cool technique, but it didn't do much and was ultimately ineffective. The story could've been improved by either just focusing on the main murder plot and really building that out or making the investigation relevant. As it was, it was just a little confusing.

The Wife Swap was filled with great ideas and poor execution. I was engaged while reading it, but it's not one that I would really recommend to others. It was just fine. Which is disappointing, because it had a lot of potential.