a perfect lie

The Perfect Home is one of the top home renovation shows on HLTV. It stars husband and wife Wyatt and Dawn Decker. Wyatt is the muscle, and Dawn is the decorator. He comes up with crazy ideas, like taking down a load-bearing wall, and she rolls her eyes at him and tries to bring him back down to earth. Originally, the show was just Wyatt, but once he started dating Dawn, he brought her on the show, and the fans immediately loved her. Their relationship, their wedding, their honeymoon trip were televised, and their fans went crazy.

Wyatt and Dawn have built their dream house in Nashville, and next they want to add kids. But they’re struggling to get pregnant. A visit to a fertility specialist informs them that the struggle to get pregnant is on Wyatt’s end. He decides to try a fertility drug that is not legal in America, ordering it from Germany through a dark part of the internet. And it works. Dawn gets pregnant with twins in months. But Wyatt isn’t quite himself on the drugs. Dawn wants him to wean himself off it, and he tells her that he will. Instead, he throws them out.

It’s not until after their babies are born, a boy and a girl, both healthy, that Dawn starts to worry about Wyatt’s behavior. He threatens her on the set, but in a way only she could hear. He stands in the twins’ room for hours, not moving, in the dark. But when she finds his secret plans for her and the twins, Dawn knows that her children are in genuine danger. She does the only thing she can think of. She packs up her children and leaves. But she doesn’t have anywhere to go. And it doesn’t take long before Wyatt is all over the news, telling everyone that his wife is suffering from postpartum depression and has taken off with their kids.

Can Dawn figure out a way to save her children, and herself, from one of the most beloved, charming men in the home renovation reality tv space? Or will she just get cancelled, pushed out of her marriage, pushed off of the show, homeless, and having to watch other people raise her children?

The Perfect Home is a debut novel that blends the best of reality home and garden television with an edge-of-your-seat domestic thriller. Told in alternating perspectives between husband and wife, this suspenseful story accelerates as the character voices become more strained. The more pressure these reality stars come up against, the more desperate their decisions. Which makes it all a win for the reader.

I devoured this book. I have watched my fair share of home renovation shows, so I knew what I was getting into with their reality show. But for everything else, I was taken on quite the ride until the end. This book goes in directions I was not expecting, but I loved it all. This is a smart thriller with genuine surprises along the way and well-defined characters that drive the story off a cliff. If you’re a fan of those HGTV shows and love a good thriller, you will want to dive right into this one.

Egalleys for The Perfect Home were provided by Scribner through NetGalley, with many thanks.