Sea Life and Secrets in “The Love of My Life”

In The Love of My Life, by Rosie Walsh, Leo begins working on his wife Emma’s bio (he’s an obituary writer and often does pre-writing for famous people, like his marine biologist wife) and realizes he doesn’t quite know his wife’s college graduation dates.  When Leo starts looking into Emma’s background to check, he finds more and more inconsistencies, which led to an grossing suspense story of private and public secrets.

What I liked best in The Love of My Life was the domestic suspense feel, with absolutely no gore. I love a suspense story with loads of suspicion and no worries that there might be guts or horror. This novel also raises interesting questions about what facts about our pasts we’re obligated to share in the present. I also liked Emma’s search for a mysterious crab she once spotted on a beach where no one else found one, and where that species shouldn’t have turned up at all.

Still, I had a couple of eyerolls reading this one. I kept finding the scale of the secrets felt… off. Without too many spoilers, Leo was completely stunned at some of Emma’s obfuscations that seemed fairly minor to me, but then he accepted the novel’s Big Secrets very well. I mean, I wouldn’t be thrilled to find out that my spouse had changed their name years before we’d met, and then had never gotten around to mentioning that. But sometimes Leo’s reactions seemed too big or too small.

There are loads of misdirections in The Love of My Life, maybe too many. I guess I like a couple of red herrings in a suspense story, but I started to feel like every clue and every hint was a big fakeout, and “oh, guess I’m being misled again” isn’t nearly as fun as discovering hints and putting them together to try to guess the story.

And certain characters were a bit lose with the evidence.  If you’ve got dark secrets, don’t write a detailed journal about it or WhatsApp messages about it, geez, are you people trying to get caught out? Oh wait, maybe you are.

So I knew that unspoken secrets were kind of the point of the book, but I also spent large section of the book annoyed that characters would not spend 5 minutes in a conversation when they could take wild, dramatic actions about it instead. Why send a text when you could drive across the country instead? Why say what you mean when you could fake-kidnap your friend? Aaaaaah, you guys, stop it!

Mixed feelings on this one. Great domestic suspense, two main characters you can root for (I also rooted for Jill until one day she woke up crazy, what’s with that section???), and intriguing overall questions. I sort of knew what I was getting into, because I felt the same way about her previous novel, Ghosted. I was intrigued, I mostly enjoyed reading it… but I also grew frustrated at all the characters not mentioning the Big Secret.

I received an advance copy of this book to review. All opinions on my book blog are my own, as always.