Just the Nicest Couple

August 1, 2022

Jack Hayes vanishes after a ferocious fight with his wife, Nina, who's now looking for him frantically, and Nina's friend and coworker Lily thinks she's the last person to have seen him before he wisped away like smoke. But she and her husband agree they can't tell anyone. Following the New York Times best-selling Local Woman Missing; with a 200,000-copy first printing.

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November 21, 2022
This uneven, initially slow-moving domestic suspense novel from bestseller Kubica (The Good Girl) focuses on two very different couples: algebra teacher Lily Scott, and her doting husband, Christian, a market research analyst; and Nina Hayes, an English teacher at the same school as Lily, and her unfaithful surgeon husband, Jake. The small fissures in both relationships are brought into sharp relief when Jake goes missing. Was it because he and Nina had argued? Was it because of Jake’s philandering? Are Lily and Christian involved in the disappearance? Where is Jake and why hasn’t he contacted his distraught wife? Chapters narrated by Lily, Nina, and Christian offer conflicting takes on what really happened, leading Christian to muse, “The line between right and wrong is getting more blurry with each day.” The author does a good job keeping the reader in the dark about Jake’s fate and dropping ambiguous if ultimately significant details that raise questions about just how nice the characters really are, but there isn’t much action and the ending comes as a bit of a letdown. Kubica has done better. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary.

December 1, 2022
Lily Scott learns what it's like when your life becomes a ticking time bomb. Her friend Nina's husband, Jake, has gone missing, and only Lily knows why. But it's only a matter of time before everyone will know what she has done. Lily is being suffocated by dread, while she struggles to keep her baby during a difficult pregnancy after several miscarriages. When Lily finally tells her husband, Christian, what happened, they take several ill-thought-out steps to cover her trail, maneuvers that serve only to fuel her fear and that lead to Christian's disappearance. Nina is relentless in her search for her husband, despite their marriage having been on uneven ground for some time. Lily's secret is finally revealed, but it comes along with another secret that may destroy her life. Kubica is a master of unnerving domestic thrillers, this being her latest (after Local Woman Missing, 2021), and fans will probably devour it in one sitting, although they may find there are a few questions left unanswered at the surprising ending.

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March 15, 2023
When a man disappears under suspicious circumstances, a young couple tries to cover their involvement while his wife begins to wonder what they know. When Christian Scott returns home to find his wife, Lily, upset and scared, he assumes at first that she's had another miscarriage. Instead, Lily shares with him a horrific story: While she was taking a walk at a nearby nature preserve, she'd run into Jake Hayes, the husband of her friend and fellow teacher Nina, and he dragged her into the forest and tried to rape her. She'd only escaped by hitting him on the head with a rock. This sets up the major conflict of the novel: Christian and Lily must try to cover Lily's tracks in case the head wound turned out to be fatal. Nina and Jake had had a fight the night before, so Nina isn't surprised that she doesn't hear from him at first, but as she begins to realize Jake is missing and then goes to the police, she has no idea that Christian and Lily are working behind the scenes to protect Lily. Eventually she notices that something is wrong with their behavior, though, and she vacillates between investigating them and retreating to her mother's comforting arms. The chapters are divided between Christian's and Nina's first-person perspectives, and the entire action unfurls after the crime has presumably been committed, which adds an intriguing layer to the suspense. There isn't much of a focus on the victim, as we never get to know Jake except through other people's reminiscences. Instead, the possible suspects take center stage. The only weakness here is a common one in Kubica's thrillers: The solution, when it comes, seems a somewhat unearned misdirection, but in this case, it also serves as a reminder that some characters are, as some people are, more invisible than others. Skillfully built tension will keep the pages turning.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.