Jade Thompson has it all. She has a successful lifestyle/design blog. She is engaged to a handsome older man, a wealthy architect, Greg Hamlin. And they are having a baby. It’s everything she ever wanted, until that night.
When Greg heard a noise outside their front door, he assumed it was another delivery for the baby’s room and went to answer the door. Instead, he was met by 2 men in black, who overpower him. One stays with him and the other runs upstairs, where Jade is getting ready for Greg’s work event. When Greg tries to fight back, he is struck in the head with a crowbar. Meanwhile, upstairs, Jade is physically assaulted and her engagement ring is stolen.
In the weeks that follow, Greg has to recover from a brain injury so severe he’d had to have part of his skull removed. Jade stays by his side in the hospital as much as possible, but she is also recovering, from her miscarriage caused by the punches to her stomach.
The police investigation doesn’t seem to get anywhere on the home invasion, but then Jade starts finding threatening notes sent to her and Greg and she starts to think it may be someone from her past. She tells the investigators but also does some checking on her own. She hadn’t been entirely honest with Greg about her past. But it turns out that he’s keeping secrets too.
Greg’s in the middle of a divorce from his wife and the mother of his two college-aged children. Because of his net worth, he wants to protect himself in the divorce as he gets set to build a new life with his new wife and child. But there is some boiling resentment based on how he moved out and moved on. His daughter is not shy about making her feelings known about Jade, and Jade starts to wonder if she could have been involved in the attack on them.
To feel safer at home, Greg installs security cameras throughout the house and adds an app to Jade’s phone so he can track her movements. But watching her every move just makes him suspicious and paranoid. He starts to think that maybe she was behind the attack, and when his daughter tells him that he needs a gun, he wonders if she might be right.
Between the accusations and suspicions, the cameras and the gun, all the drama simmers to a boiling point. And when the intruder is revealed and all the secrets come out, will everyone survive the fallout? Will anyone?
Her Three Lives is the latest domestic thriller from Cate Holahan. By putting a relationship under the microscope, you can see how the secrets create weak spots that can be exploited, how spying breeds suspicion, and how important paying attention can be.
While I liked the slow build of the story of Her Three Lives, I struggled to like the characters. Both Jade and Greg seemed to be calculating more than caring, and despite what they had been through, I didn’t feel a vulnerability that I could relate to. I really wanted to like this novel more than I did. It’s not bad. It’s not as great as I had hoped.
Egalleys for Her Three Lives were provided by Grand Central Publishing through NetGalley, with many thanks.
