The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins

 

A solid 3 out of 5 for me. The Wife Upstairs was funny and had a good pace to it. Everything was going well and the story was interesting, until the end... The ending felt flat, and could have so easily been better that it made me frustrated.

The Wife Upstairs tries to use characters from Jane Eyre, although I don't see much similarity in the characters other than the names. The story is about Jane, who is a dogwalker for many families in an affluent neighborhood, the Thornfield Estates. Jane wants to be like the housewives in Thornfield - with lots of money. She habitually steals from her clients, justifying it by telling herself they are so rich they won't miss it anyway. Two wives in the neighborhood, Bea and Blanche, went missing and were suspected to have died after their outing together on a lake. Blanche's body was discovered. Bea's was not, but declared dead. Police suspected Blanche's husband, Tripp, for their murders, due to some circumstantial evidence. Jane sees this as an opportunity to date Eddie, Bea's husband. The plan seems to be working as she puts her moves on Eddie. The only problem is... SPOILER ALERT! Bea isn't dead - she's locked up upstairs in a panic room and Eddie has been bringing her food and sustenance to keep her alive, even continuing to have sex with her. After Eddie proposes to Jane, Jane starts introducing herself to everyone as the next Mrs. Rochester to the whole neighborhood. Tripp arranges a lunch with Jane to warn her that Eddie could be the killer because Tripp knows he (Tripp) isn't the killer. Jane starts going through the house to see if she can find any evidence of Eddie being a killer. She ends up discovering Bea upstairs. She lets her out and they talk, when Eddie barges in and Jane throws a figurine at him, right on his head, knocking out some teeth and knocking him unconscious. Jane and Bea drag him in the panic room and locked him in there. The only issue is, SPOILER ALERT! At this point, since Jane and Bea have been talking, she realizes Eddie isn't the killer. The killer of Blanche is Bea! Eddie wakes up in the panic room and thinks to himself that he actually knows there's a secret exit of the panic room - he would know because he built the house. But did he use the secret exit? The book doesn't tell us. The next thing - Eddie starts a fire in the panic room, betting on Bea to come back upstairs and unlocking the door. The fire alarm goes off, sure enough, Bea runs upstairs, which means she really can't entertain the thought of Eddie being burned alive (she doesn't know about the existence of the secret exit) even though he had her locked up there. She's convinced herself he only did that to save her from being caught for murder (which is likely the major reason anyways. The other reason is to save her large fortune and company.) Once Bea runs upstairs, Jane decides to run out of the house to save herself. (I don't blame her.) While she's being treated at the hospital for smoke inhalation, the police tells her Eddie and Bea died in the fire, and that the fire burned so hot that the only thing they discovered was some of Eddie's teeth. Of course, she's thinking, that's probably the teeth knocked out by the figurine. Later, Jane finds out that Eddie had left her his entire fortune (which was Bea's fortune that became his when she was declared dead the first time around). This is odd to me because, we have every reason to believe he would use the secret exit to get out of the panic room. If so, why would he give all his money away? We know he put his moves on Bea when he first met her because he knew she was very wealthy, so it just doesn't make sense for him to not at least leave some money for himself.