“YOU TRUST HER WITH YOUR DARKEST SECRETS. YOU SHOULDN’T”
- Book: The Marriage Counselor
- Location: Florida
- Author: Dea Poirier
Oh my gosh! My reading schedule could never be complete without a good psychological thriller on the horizon somewhere. However, there are psychological thrillers and then there are psychological thrillers like ‘The Marriage Counselor’, which held me in thrall from the very first page to that very final word, then still left me gripping the edge of my seat for dear life, even though I knew it was all over – well, for me at least, although I’m not quite sure about Adele’s future!
Let me try and explain..
…
Adele is a marriage counselor, the daughter of a couple of very successful daytime television counselors (picture Jerry Springer meets Ricki Lake), but who were tragically killed in a car crash when Adele was a young child. She was moved away from her native Orlando, Florida, to be cared for by relatives across State in Naples. She has however, kept in touch with her best friend from school, Tara and there are no secrets between them! Now back living in Orlando, Adele has been married for seven years to Patrick, although relations between them have rather soured in recent times and Adele suspects that Patrick might be planning for a future without her.
When Patrick goes missing from work, his employer contacts the police, as they have no record of a next of kin on file and no idea that he was ever married. There are also some large amounts of company financial anomalies, which come to light at around the same time as his disappearance and which need investigating. Adele has no idea that Patrick hasn’t been going to work, or that to all intents and purposes, out of the house, she doesn’t exist in his world. The investigating officer is Cameron, Adele’s long-term ex boyfriend, who never wanted their relationship to end, hasn’t ever got over Adele and has never married or had a long-term relationship during the intervening years.
Adele finds it really difficult to be heartbroken and worried by Patrick’s disappearance, when she discovers the full horrors of the financial mess he has left her in and about the many double lives, as a scheming philanderer, scammer and double-crossing business partner, he seems to have been living. Adele’s problems only multiply exponentially, when the case hits the headline news and her own business also begins to suffer. Then, from out of the blue, allegations about the honesty and authenticity of her parents show and the way in which they had died, only adds fuel to the flames and she quickly finds her whole life crumbling around her. It appears that she can trust no one except Tara, but when she too is removed from the equation, where else and to whom, can she turn?
The only person she seems able to depend on to fight her corner and offer her a shoulder to cry on, is Cameron..
So far, so good! But now events take one strange turn after another and reality never returns again to what I had thought was going to be a straightforward storyline.
Just remember, “you can’t con a conman!”
…
Wow! This creepy, multi-layered, well-paced storyline certainly packed a punch, with a body count I lost track of, so freely were they added. Nothing was quite as it seemed and there were more twists and turns than you could shake a stick at, which kept me on my toes from beginning to end, complicating the tangled web of lies and secrets which overlaid everything. And yes, whilst I might have worked out a couple of the many denouements for myself and one was revealed during the course of the story, the aura of apprehension and tension was still unbearable throughout, with the final gut-punch finale flooring me completely. Just don’t assume anything is over, until it’s over!
At times, it was difficult to tell who was the most controlling or coercive in the relationship between Patrick and Adele, as with their combined inherently cynical, duplicitous traits and many secrets, both had a veritable catalogue of disgruntled friends and colleagues who bore them ill will and held grudges against them. Although, as the story was only told from a single point of view, that of Adele herself, the narration by default was rather biased. In fact, they rather deserved one another in many respects and did Adele get her ‘just desserts’ in the end? I’ll leave that one for you to decide, although I know how I feel about it.
Surprisingly and quite unusually, despite their being well defined and fleshed out, I couldn’t name any single character with whom I felt any real empathy or connection. I found them simply too manipulative and malevolent to be in any way compelling or with any depth I could invest in. It was always the thought of which of them was least unlikable, but even that was a bit too much of a stretch for my imagination. Definitely never fall for a man in uniform (she says having been married to one for over forty years)!
As an avid ‘armchair traveller’, this storyline probably didn’t quite tick all the boxes in the location stakes. However, there was enough general sense of time and place to keep me happy, with the fact that it was set in Orlando, Florida, a place I have visited on so many occasions, a real added bonus.
Given that one or two events seemed just a little too contrived to be viable and I rather needed to suspend belief to get past them, I believe that four stars is probably a fair assessment. Would I read this author again, you bet!
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