The Innocent Wife by Amy Lloyd

Book Review

"She felt suddenly very alone, as though the person she married had never existed and she had woken up to a life she didn't recognise, in the middle of a story she didn't understand."

The Innocent Wife is out now in eBook format and will be released in hardback on December 28th 2017. It is written by Amy Lloyd and published by Century.

This is quite a timely book, considering the popularity of Making a Murderer. And the plot involves a similar premise, with a documentary crew making a film about Dennis Danson being convicted of murder at 18 on very little evidence. This really attracted my attention; I'm always a  bit fascinated by these did he/didn't he crimes. I'm also fascinated by the men and women who write to criminals on death row and end up dedicating their life to them. So The Innocent Wife felt like a sure hit with me. But, while I did enjoy it, I thought it lost momentum in the middle and didn't delve as deep as I wanted it to.

The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère

Book Review

"I was thinking of the big white void that had slowly taken over inside him until all that was left was that semblance of a man dressed in black."

The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception is written by Emmanuel Carrère and published by Vintage.

I'd never heard of The Adversary before, or Jean-Claude Romand, but when I saw this latest edition on NetGalley I had to request it as the true story sounded so incredible. In fact, I think if the story of a man conning his family for almost 20 years and then killing them all before his secret could come out was written in a fiction, I would have said it wasn't believable.

And yet, real life is often stranger than fiction, Luckily, Carrère tells this story in a way that is quite understated, letting the brutality of the crime do the talking rather than courting controversy by inserting thrills. The Adversary is a well written and fascinating exploration of a crime and the criminal.