100 pages in, this women’s novel turns into a murder mystery. The man whom Rachel most suspects of killing her daughter is a balding PE teacher at the school … The question turns out to be how various crimes — from murder to bad manners to adultery and back again — can be recognized and suitably punished. The plot here swings along, with the details of women’s lives chronicled down to the last broken appliance and misunderstood comment. And murder, too.
All husbands – and wives – have secrets, but John-Paul Fitzpatrick's is devastating … Moriarty's pulsing pace and engaging characters make it well worth the wait to find out John-Paul's secret. She avoids an unfortunate trend in women's fiction to make men bad guys or doofuses. The men in The Husband's Secret are fully realized, thoughtful and caring, as flawed and faithful as the women who love them … Moriarty presents a nuanced and moving portrait of the meaning of love, both marital and familial, and how life can hinge on a misunderstanding or a decision made in haste.
The Husband’s Secret is a sharp, thoughtful read — a sneaky sort of wolf in chick-lit clothing...Liane Moriarty weaves Cecilia’s story in with those of two other women in crisis … But Secret isn’t all Down Under noir, either; even as these three women’s lives are blown apart, they still have jobs and families and mostly intact senses of humor, and they carry on … Moriarty ultimately can’t resist wrapping up her story lines with a bow that will probably feel too shiny and pink-petal neat for some. But you don’t need a husband or a secret to feel for her characters’ very real moral quandaries, and to want that shiny bow for them a little bit, too.
Moriarty experiments with the intersection of comedy and tragedy in her slyly ambitious consideration of secrecy, temptation, guilt and human beings’ general imperfection … As the women confront the past and make hard decisions about their futures (the novel’s men are pale and passive), their fates collide in unexpected ways. Moriarty may be an edgier, more provocative and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy. There is real darkness here, but it is offset by the author’s natural wit—she weaves in the Pandora myth and a history of the Berlin Wall—and irrepressible goodwill toward her characters.
Moriarty puts three women in an impossible situation and doesn’t cut them any slack. Cecilia Fitzpatrick lives to be perfect: a perfect marriage, three perfect daughters, and a perfectly organized life. Then she finds a letter from her husband, John-Paul, to be opened only in the event of his death. She opens it anyway, and everything she believed is thrown into doubt … Simultaneously a page-turner and a book one has to put down occasionally to think about and absorb, Moriarty’s novel challenges the reader as well as her characters, but in the best possible way.
