Michele Campbell | It's Always the Husband

Between hardcore binging last season of "Orange is the New Black" and trying to fight off my summertime allergies, I did finally get to dive into "It's Always the Husband" by Michele Campbell. This book has been popping up all over Instagram and some of my reading recommendation lists from the internet. It's Campbell's debut novel, and I am always a sucker to see what a new author has to show us all! I was not let down at all. 

Plot:

In college, Kate, Aubrey and Jenny are inseparable. Twenty years later, their friendship takes a deadly turn . . .

Three young women who could not be more different meet as college roommates and become fast friends.  Wealthy, privileged, blonde and gorgeous, Kate Eastman seems like she has it all.  But her Park Avenue upbringing conceals a tragic loneliness and a wild side powerful enough to drag down everyone around her. Aubrey Miller comes from a poor family and can’t believe her luck when she winds up at prestigious Carlisle College rooming with Kate and Jenny. Aubrey would follow Kate anywhere — to parties, to nightclubs, even to her death.  Jenny Vega — bright, pretty, ambitious — is the practical one, the striver, who’d rather study and get ahead than party. She adores her roommates, and she knows they’re bad for her. Will she save them from themselves, and each other, or will she become another victim of the chaos that follows in their wake?

A terrible tragedy at the end of freshman year leaves these three young women with a dangerous secret. Twenty years later, older but perhaps no wiser, they return to the scene of the crime. When one of them winds up dead, it could be suicide, or it could be murder. If it was murder, was it the husband – like the cops think – or was it the best friend? This book will keep you guessing until the very last page.

Review:

So, is it always the husband...or is it the best friend(s)? This book literally started off with me holding my breath as one of the three women we would get to know so tremendously well is led up to a bridge by an unknown person and told to do one thing. Jump.

Which is it? Is it Aubrey? Jenny? Kate? And who is the the person leading them? Is it Aubrey? Jenny? Kate? Someone we have yet to meet? Well, that could be obvious being that we don't know anyone yet. 

The book then settles warmly into a bright and cheerful Ivy League college with a hopeful group of girls all so incredibly different meeting for the first time twenty years in the past. What I loved about this was how well each girl was written and how Campbell really stayed true to each character. They could've all been listed as "Girl" and I would have been able to differentiate each one just based on the dialogue or the actions described. Character development, A+.

As the story goes on, like all friendships, we get to witness our three new favorite girls bump heads, argue, and make some mistakes. One unfortunately ends in tragedy.

The book then jumps ahead twenty years with Kate making her way back to the town that they all went to school at. Jenny and Aubrey are happy to see her after only sporadically keeping contact over the years. The book then goes back and forth between some pretty heavy issues in the past not even dealing necessarily with the tragedy that happened at school or the tragedy that is twenty years away.

I was eating these pages alive. I couldn't contain my ravenous hunger for more as I quickly found myself flying through 80% of this extremely well-written read within the first sitting. The character development, setting, and plot all wove this dark spiderweb that I quickly and willingly let envelop me. 

As we approach the second portion of this brilliant novel, we quickly find out which woman met her untimely death and are left with so many questions. Who? Why? How? Over the next course of about 100 pages, I developed readers whiplash flipping the pages and going back and forth emotionally with these characters. Even as the action or witty dialogue and fun plot points kind of simmered with this part, I loved that Campbell turned this into a police procedure portion of the book and flawlessly entered a world where these women grew up and ultimately settled into their fates.

As I approached the ending, I was still ravenous for more. The red herrings, the tension, the clues, and the answers were all simultaneously building as I went on and I was left reading the final chapter with not only pleasure, but gratitude that I was able to enjoy such a thrilling ride with this novel. Pretty cheap for $25 if you ask me. This is the kind of book I could go on and on about, but I don't want to give too much away. The ending was shocking and will stick with me for a while. I highly recommend this and cannot wait to see what Campbell does next. Check this one out, you won't be disappointed.

Rating: 5/5