Dear Wife

A woman leaves an abusive marriage the way you have to leave one: no notice, no forwarding address, a new name and a new face and a bus out of town. She has been planning it for a long time and she has planned it well.

Somewhere else, a woman has gone missing, and a detective is working that case with a husband who is behaving the way husbands in these cases often behave.

Kimberly Belle runs the two threads alongside each other and withholds the thing that would let you line them up. The obvious assumption is that the runaway and the missing woman are the same person. The book is built on how long it can keep you from being sure of that, and on how much of each woman's account of her own marriage turns out to be reliable.