Lead Review

• Book: The Millionaire’s Wife
• Location: Bournemouth, The West Country
• Author: Shalini Boland

Review Author: Tina Hartas

I enjoyed listening to this thriller as an audiobook.

It opens with the violent death of a woman in Barbados, mown down by a speed boat. In the upmarket enclave of Westbourne, Bournemouth, Anna is living with her husband Will and they have a good and prosperous lifestyle. They cement their family life with the purchase of a new dog and all seems rosy until Anna receives a text with the bloody image of a dead woman. She soon understands who the woman killed in Barbados is and she knows that her well-buried past is coming to haunt her.

Anna’s early years were spent by the sea. Her Swedish parents were in the UK for some years and so Anna went to school. and she and another student, Sian, become firm friends and hung out together. Anna also catches the eye of Fin, the most desired boy in the school, and after they leave school, they decide to move in together, even though her grades would facilitate a move to a top university. But she is smitten, and her parents can make no inroads, she is determined to invest in the relationship. They work in minimum wage jobs and struggle to make ends meet, and the relationship is becoming hard to manage. Finally, when Fin brings home a bargain wetsuit from his place of work, Anna finds herself coming to the end of her tether and it is at that point it becomes clearer that Fin has quite a short fuse. They soon have to move out from their lodging and things go from bad to worse until Anna calls it a day.

So how did Anna go from destitution to living a luxury lifestyle? She is certainly harbouring some potentially life changing secrets in her background and soon her hand is forced to reveal them.

I enjoyed listening to this novel, it had a good sense of pace. It is well set out and easy to follow, which can be tricky when there are two timelines. Perhaps the ending was a little long winded, followed by the final denouement which seems like a bit of an add-on but ties up all the potential flapping ends.

In TripFiction terms, setting isn’t particularly strong.

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