Confessions on the 7:45, by Lisa Unger, is a suspense novel, beginning with two seemingly-random women and two sets of secrets. Selena knows her husband is cheating, and when her new friend, “Martha” announces that she’s having an affair with her boss. From here, the story gets darker and their connection seems less and less like a random encounter.

Selena is kind of the perfect wealthy wife that I couldn’t help hating. You could just picture her Instagram updates of her sons’ mess in one corner of her massive, decorated house, maybe with a Live-love-laugh or a Gather in the background. She had the goofy money worries of someone who owns a big house and a couple of cars in the suburbs, hires a nanny, works flexible hours in the city, etc.  So, when her marriage began to show cracks, I didn’t feel particularly bad for her. I didn’t really care that her husband was cheating on her, either.

Normally, eye-rolling at the scale of the protagonist’s problems is not a great sign, but it really  worked here because “Martha” also though Selena’s charmed life was annoying. Also, when Selena’s actual problems were revealed, it showed how carefully she’d hidden her husband’s behavior and her own emotions into her picture-perfect marriage.

This is another gore-free thriller. There’s a death but it’s not gross, because there’s not a lot of gory description about the body, the focus is more on what to do about this huge new secret and how to handle the death. That’s usually the Lisa Unger vibe, and I was really glad,  because I love suspense novels with dangerous twists, but my tolerance for gore is very, very low.

This novel has the same suspenseful vibes that I enjoyed in  The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, especially with the same themes of deception, marriages breaking down, and family secrets, in gore-free domestic suspense. Watch Out For Her, by Samantha M. Bailey,or The Lies I Tell, by Julie Clark also have heavy secrets and lies, with no gore. So if you liked one of these books, I’m sure you’ll like this one.