Single wife, double life

I usually enjoy Adele Parks' writing, so I am always happy to hear that she has a new book out. But hearing that her newest story would be following the same set of characters as an earlier novel of hers was somewhat unexpected.

After I realised which characters were being referred to, I was delighted at the prospect of reading this new book, Just Between Us, since it turned out to be a sequel to a very interesting story of hers that I had read just a few months ago, titled Woman Last Seen.

Woman Last Seen is a suspenseful, and at times uncomfortable, read. Based on a very unusual concept, the book finished with an open-ended conclusion, which had left me both intrigued and a little dissatisfied. 

The second part of this duology is set firmly in the COVID-19 period, and successfully conveys the sense of confusion and claustrophobia that people across the globe were experiencing at that time. The story picks up on two cases of women who had disappeared in London prior to the onset of the pandemic.

At first glance, the two missing women would appear to have little in common. Kai, after all, was the glamorous trophy wife of a young Dutch millionaire, and Leigh was the devoted wife and mother of a middle-class household, where she lived with Mark and his two children, her young stepsons.

But as the canny police officer in charge, DC Clements, soon finds out, the two women have just about everything in common. Because they are the same person! Kylie (Kai, Leigh) Gillingham has been living a double life, simultaneously juggling very different lifestyles and relationships.

While the premise of the first novel seems bizarre, it was convincingly written. Not to mention that the idea of bigamy is far from new. Similar cases have even been identified in Bangladesh.

So it is not the core concept of the story that is particularly sensational. What is unusual here is the fact that the bigamist is a woman, and that she has managed to pull off such a complicated web of lies so successfully.

When DC Clements misses, by just a few hours, the opportunity to recover the abducted Kylie—who was being held prisoner by an unknown captor in the initial period after she disappeared—the police officer becomes obsessed with finding out what actually happened to the missing woman.

Meanwhile, as the lockdown begins and Kylie's family(ies) are struggling to come to terms with what they have found out about someone that they thought they knew well, a parallel story is unfolding. Stacie Jones and her devoted father are trying to deal with her harrowing diagnosis and its after-effects. But is Stacie's father caring, or controlling? The real question, of course, is not whether the two narratives are linked, but how. Spoiler: the full story here may not be quite what you think it is.

While the plot of Just Between Us is perhaps slightly less shocking than Woman Last Seen, the storytelling is equally effective. I found the story gripping and the book hard to put down. For anyone looking for an interesting, absorbing, suspenseful read, I would suggest both books in this set, but if you don't read Woman Last Seen, it's still worth reading Just Between Us as a stand-alone story. The second novel successfully builds on the narrative of the first, but the two books each offer a different set of thrills, and I recommend both.

Farah Ghuznavi is a writer, translator and development worker. Her work has been published in 11 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe and the USA. Writer in Residence with Commonwealth Writers, she published a short story collection titled Fragments of Riversong (Daily Star Books, 2013), and edited the Lifelines anthology (Zubaan Books, 2012). She is currently working on her new short story collection and is on Instagram @farahghuznavi.