A good thriller keeps you guessing. Who’s not what they say they are? What happens next? Who really committed the crimes? If the thriller works, its revelations startle you. You don’t necessarily read thrillers for depth of character or philosophical profundities, but instead for plot, and there’s no shame in that. The better the plot, the more murderous the characters, the better the thriller. On both counts, Liv Constantine’s new novel, The Senator’s Wife, delivers.
Focusing on a senator Whit Montgomery, and his ill wife, Sloane, the novel traces her declining health against a background of political corruption and skullduggery. As the bodies pile up, the main characters grow increasingly suspicious, and the pile gets higher. Each chapter zooms in on a different person, but Sloane fills most of the book, as her health goes south, portrayed in painful but utterly convincing detail. It doesn’t help that she is fabulously rich and therefore a target for the unscrupulous.
Much of this thriller has to do with wealth—a growing trend across all forms of pop culture from TV’s White Lotus to last year’s Academy Awards Best Picture nominee Triangle of Sadness. How Sloane grew up in great affluence and married into even more money is elaborately laid out. So are the reactions to her wealth from those around her. One caregiver’s envy of her employers is so understatedly presented it’s hard not to sympathize. “Athena picked them up, noticing they were Prada.” Or, later, beyond understated: “And it didn’t escape her notice that Sloane introduced Athena as if she were a friend, never referring to the fact that Athena worked for her.”
But not everyone is so generous in their assessments of the rich. The senator himself harbors bitter memories of his somewhat shabby origins. “He hadn’t been more than 10 years old when he came to understand that those who had more looked down on those who had less.” This senator has pulled himself up by latching on to those more powerful and wealthier than he. This leads him to cut corners and conceal his tackier moves from his wife, who is, by comparison, a paragon of dignity and integrity.
The novel convincingly depicts the repellent milieu of Washington powerhouses—senators, donors, and even a vice president. With frank verisimilitude, this world is shown as corrupt and, in some quarters, depraved. Yet all that is concealed from do-gooders such as Sloane and her mother-in-law, Rosemary—they know of it, of course, but avoid it like the plague. However, the novel reveals how even the best efforts of good people cannot stop Washington rot from spreading.
Sloane’s caregiver, Athena, is pivotal to the plot and thus very carefully sketched. The reader knows from the start that she is not what she seems, but what is she? The author sedulously conceals this until the end, where the revelation puts all the puzzle pieces into place. Until then, Athena remains a sympathetic character, even though the reader wonders what she’s up to. As Athena skulks and snoops around, it certainly looks like she’s up to no good. But Sloane doesn’t become suspicious until very late, and by then her condition has seriously deteriorated.
The novel’s villain has a Machiavellian plot of such complexity, with so many moving parts, that it’s astonishing to see it pulled off. The reader’s correct suspicions are at every point sidetracked, so that by the end, the final reveal does come as a shock. It’s no surprise that the author is, in fact, a team of two sisters, Lynne and Valerie Constantine: For one person to map out each cog in this incredibly complicated machine would be difficult. Two authors make more sense, with them correcting each other and backing each other up to make sure there are no loose ends.
“If she’d learned one thing in her 82 years,” Rosemary thinks, “it was that most things are out of our control. The best we can do is live with integrity and try our utmost to do our best.” Such virtue comes under mortal assault in this thriller, and while, in life, most things may very well be out of our control, in fiction they aren’t. That’s what these two authors demonstrate, by propelling the reader through a tale of murder, betrayal, and revenge, a tale whose true villains remain hidden most of the time and whose heroine is nearly helpless and bedridden.
The Senator’s Wife by Liv Constantine; Bantam Books, 304 pages. livconstantine.com. $28
