Two Dead Wives

by Adele Parks

The book begins in early 2020, at the start of the pandemic lockdown in the UK. Forty-three year old Kylie Gillingham has been missing for two weeks. Police have discovered an apartment where she was kept prisoner, chained to a radiator, but she’s no longer there. Did she escape? But there’s been no trace of her anywhere, on social media or elsewhere. Even though they’ve found no body, police suspect that her husband has murdered her.

But which husband? They’ve also learned that Kylie was secretly living a double life, married simultaneously to two men. As Leigh, she’s been married to Mark Fletcher for ten years, stepmother to his two young sons, Oli and Seb, who are now eleven and fourteen.  But as Kai, she married wealthy Dann Janssen four years ago.

The strongest suspicion falls on Dann, the second husband. Not only was she kept prisoner in the same building where he owns the penthouse, but he has left the country and is now in the Netherlands.

None of this is a spoiler — we learn all this in the opening pages. That’s because this book is a sequel to Woman Last Seen, which ended on that ambiguous point: was Kylie dead or alive? However, you don’t have to read the previous book first; that setup is all you need to know to enjoy this book as a standalone.

The book skips ahead to June 2020, to a different set of characters. Thirty-seven-year-old Stacie Jones is recovering from brain surgery. She had been living in Paris, but returned to the UK for the surgery and is now recovering at her childhood home, living with her father in his remote beachside house near Lyme Regis. The worst side effect is that she has lost all memory of her pre-surgery life.

The book switches points of view back and forth between several characters: the two husbands, the stepsons, Kylie’s best friend Fiona, the police investigators, and Stacie. All the story threads pull together eventually, with some very touching scenes with the young stepsons, and some especially suspenseful and heart-pounding scenes at the end.

[Note: This book was published under a different title in the UK, where it’s called Just Between Us.  The previous book also had a different title in the UK; it was published there as Both of You.]

Adele Parks was born in Teesside, North Yorkshire in 1969. An avid reader from childhood, when she was seven a librarian suggested she might like to be a writer. She took that advice to heart, though she also was told she would need another job. The first member of her family to go to university, she studied English at the University of Leicester. She subsequently taught English in Italy and worked in advertising in Botswana, before returning to the UK and joining a management consultancy firm.

Her first novel, Playing Away, was published in 2000; since then she’s published twenty-four novels in as many years. All her novels have become bestsellers. Her first books were romantic comedies and relationship dramas, followed by two historical women’s fiction novels set during and after the First World War. In the past decade, she’s become best known for her psychological thrillers (or “domestic noirs.”) Regardless of genre, her books focus on concepts of family, love, parenting and fidelity, examining the thorny issues of the lives people lead.

Her thriller Lies, Lies, Lies was shortlisted for the 2020 Fiction Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. She is an ambassador of the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency, two charities that promote literacy in the UK. In 2022, she was awarded an M.B.E for Services to Literature.

She married her first husband at age 25, but the marriage broke down when their son Conrad was less than a year old. A year after that she met Jim, marrying him two years later. Conrad is now an adult, and Adele and Jim live in Guildford, Surrey.