The Perfect Affair
Angela Henry
336 pages
Published January 15th, 2024
Storm Publishing
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The Perfect Affair is a domestic suspense thriller about a married professor of English at a private university, who has a fling with his glamorous but deranged colleague, jeapordising his marriage, his career and even his life. I saw some reviews which raved about the cleverness of the plot and all the twists, so took advantage of my newly acquired Kindle Unlimited subscription to check it out.It turned out to be a good reminder of why I got sick of this genre a few years ago – this takes all the usual tropes and piles one implausible revelation after another to leave a jumbled mess about awful idiotic characters behaving abysmally
It turned out to be a good reminder of why I got sick of this genre a few years ago – this takes all the usual tropes and piles one implausible revelation after another to leave a jumbled mess about awful idiotic characters behaving abysmallyAaron Nichols begins an affair with beautiful Cara Morton under the nose of his wife, Paige. He thinks he’s been discreet, but soon discovers the whole university is gossiping about him, and that Cara is not what she seems, so ends it, but then Cara disappears, making him the lead suspect. The more he and Paige learn about Cara’s past, the bigger the trouble he finds himself in. Can they uncover the truth and save their marriage before it’s too late?
The problem with this genre as a whole is that it’s so dependent on shocking the reader with supposedly clever twists that the narrators have to be unreliable, and that makes them unlikeable and therefore difficult to care about.
This is told from various perspectives – Aaron, Paige, Alonso the detective and Cara as a child, in different time periods, which got quite confusing. Every character has a difficult past and is keeping secrets – adultery, abuse, betrayal and even murder. Aaron and Paige are selfish and, for supposedly educated professionals, unbelievably stupid. The main point of difference here was that all of the key characters are black, which is unusual for this genre in my experience. I did keep reading to find out what it was all about, but found it rather a slog, and even a bit depressing – the title is a complete misnomer – it’s far from perfect! No more domestic suspense for me, but read it if you love this kind of thing.
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