The Wife Upstairs

Jane is twenty-three, a former foster kid who pays her way by walking dogs in a gated community outside Birmingham, Alabama. She goes by a fake name. Then she nearly collides with Eddie Rochester, a handsome, recently widowed man who owns the grandest house in the neighborhood.

Their romance draws Jane into a life of money she has never known. It also draws her toward the story of Eddie's first wife, Bea. She rose from poverty to wealth as a beauty with a thriving lifestyle brand, and then she vanished.

This is a Southern Gothic update of Jane Eyre, set in the present day. Jane's chapters in the present alternate with diary entries written by Bea, and a short late section from a third perspective overturns what the reader has assumed.

Both women narrate unreliably. Jane is practiced at lying and reinventing herself, so she is almost as hard to trust as the secrets she tries to uncover about the house's previous mistress. The question that drives the book is what happened to Bea, and who is telling the truth about it.