The Perfect Wife – JP Delaney
QUITE simply one of best suspense thrillers of recent years and deserves to be a hit but I will Gun Girl and The Girl on the Train.
The Perfect Wife takes a terrific idea and runs with it at breakneck speed, with very clever twists, ever-tightening tension and a deep understanding of characters.
It’s what you might have expected if techno-thriller king Michael Crichton – creator of Jurassic Park – had written psychological suspense..
Abbie awakens five years after a mysterious accident and discovers all is not well in her ‘perfect’ marriage to tech billionaire Tim.
For a start, Abbie died in the accident and the heroine of the story is actually a perfectly-formed robot replica implanted with the real woman’s memories and personality.
The grieving genius has created Abbie 2.0 not for sex, but as a ‘cobot’, a companion he can fall in love with, and who will look after their severely autistic son Danny.
Abbie shows rather more humanity than Tim as she gradually realises her husband is an emotionally-retarded control freak, and she begins secret investigations into what really happened.
As the plot twists and turns in expected and unexpected ways, the novel asks disturbing questions about artificial intelligence, identity, sexuality and power.
But never at the expense of being a gripping page turner. A worthy follow-up to JP Delaney’s novel Believe Me.
* Released on August 8.
David Knights
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