(Plot Summary from Amazon) No husbands allowed
Only minutes after Abbie Elliot and her three best friends step off of a private helicopter, they enter the most luxurious, sumptuous, sensually pampering hotel they have ever been to. Their lavish presidential suite overlooks Monte Carlo, and they surrender: to the sun and pool, to the sashimi and sake, to the Bruno Paillard champagne. For four days they’re free to live someone else’s life. As the weekend moves into pulsating discos, high-stakes casinos, and beyond, Abbie is transported to the greatest pleasure and release she has ever known.
What happened last night?
In the morning’s harsh light, Abbie awakens on a yacht, surrounded by police. Something awful has happened–something impossible, unthinkable. Abbie, Winnie, Serena, and Bryah are arrested and accused of the foulest crime imaginable. And now the vacation of a lifetime becomes the fight of a lifetime–for survival. GUILTY WIVES is the ultimate indulgence, the kind of nonstop joy-ride of excess, friendship, betrayal, and danger that only James Patterson can create.
This is easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Just awful. Four 40-something girlfriends take a weekend trip to Monte Carlo. They go swimming and then go out clubbing and drinking and dancing and then like the summary says they end up on a yacht. The next morning they’re all arrested and held prisoner by the French police and questioned for… get this… KILLING THE PRESIDENT OF FRANCE! Really? REALLY?
They didn’t do it. We know they didn’t do it. They know they didn’t do it. No one believes them. The president of France was WILDLY popular. The whole country is out for blood against the “Monte Carlo Mistresses”.
So the ridiculousness of this book. It wouldn’t have been as awful if Chapter Freaking FIVE didn’t talk about the four husbands of the women watching them out the window of an adjacent hotel when they were down at the pool and one of them having an “idea” and also? A gun.
Now way later in the book the main character’s husband visits her in prison. Oh yes, they were very much convicted and sentenced. And they are arguing about his affair (obviously) and he makes a snide remark about her behavior that day at the pool in her tiny bikini.
NOW, what I think would have been awesome is if WE the reader didn’t already know the husbands had been there and we could have ALL had that *GASP* moment with the main character when she and we all realize together that HE WAS THERE. The day before the president was killed. Our minds could have started to race along with hers to try to figure out if that mattered. How it mattered and what it meant. But NOOOOOO we already have known for 90 some chapters that all the husbands were there and armed. Ridiculous.
This book was not without its bright spots but they were way too few and far between and never quite drown out the darkness of the implausible premise or the fact that we were given the answer early on. Blatantly. Maybe this was done on purpose? Maybe we were supposed to know the whole time? But watching it play out with the main character whittling it out was not compelling enough on its own. It would have been far better to be whittling the answer out with her.
I would not recommend this book to anyone. This is James Patterson’s latest as it just came out the 27th of March. This is also the first James Patterson book I’ve ever read. The only thing keeping me from saying it will be my last is because it was co-written. Maybe it’s not Patterson that’s awful, maybe it’s David Ellis. I just know whichever one of them had the grand idea to put the husbands in Chapter FIVE needs to go back to “Keeping Readers Guessing 101″. I kept hoping for some bizarre twist at the end to make it NOT the husbands. It never happened. It was hideous.
I have already un-recommended this book to four people. I finished it 5 hours ago.
I’m not even putting the Amazon or Barnes & Noble links on this one. It was just. that. bad.
I’ll warn you, it’s kind of typical of James Patterson (at least the ones I’ve read) to tell the story from all points of view, even the killer’s. That being said, it isn’t always obvious who exactly the killer it.
Thank you for taking one for the team!
This is the first book that I’ve ever abandoned (as my niece’s son says for an unfinished book). I got into the third chapter and it was so ‘not good’, that I stopped reading it. So glad to now realize that I was not the only one who didn’t like it. There are a lot of great JP books, but this is not one of them.