[amazon_link id=”0802122345″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : A Circle of Wives
Author : Alice LaPlante
Genre : Mystery
Publisher : Atlantic Monthly Press (Grove Atlantic)
Pages: 325
Publish Date : March 4th, 2014
Source : Netgalley / Publisher ARC
Rating : 4.2/5

That title had me going. Circle here is a collective noun, so that should pique your interest. The book starts off with a funeral. Good-hearted, skilled plastic surgeon Dr. John Taylor has succumbed to a heart attack in a hotel room. Commanding the funeral is Deborah, his stoic wife of thirty-four years. Then a strange woman shows up to pay her respects. And another. Turns out they’re all wives of the deceased, only they were completely in the dark about the polygamy. Also hovering close by are the police; there is reason to believe that Dr. Taylor’s passing was not from natural causes.

So the good doctor had three wives but he is not quite the villain we want to picture in our heads. He was in his 60s, out of shape, and a philanthropist to boot, performing pro-bono surgeries on deformed children. The three women in his life: society matron Deborah Taylor, accountant M.J. Taylor and pediatric oncologist Dr. Helen Richter are very different people, but it is of no doubt that they all loved him in their own way, and as weird as it sounds, he them. Of course, given the curious situation, the police consider all three women prime suspects.

Twenty-eight year old detective Samantha Adams is a full-blown character in this book, with time devoted to understanding her personal and professional life. She lives with boyfriend, “academic wannabe” Peter and they’ve been having problems connecting lately. She has a hard time being taken seriously, given her young looks, but will have to dig deep to uncover the slippery truth about Dr. Taylor’s life.

LaPlante tells the story in first person, from the point of view of each character, one chapter at a time. Each of the characters speaks about their life and relationship to the dead doctor. I loved this because it defines a character via varied points of view, each point of view embellishing a different facet. I get a deep-down portrait of the narrator, but then I also get a portrait of the other characters from the narrator’s point of view. So I know what Deborah is thinking, and then, I also know what Deborah thinks of MJ and Helen and Samantha. And this back and forth between different points of view is so skillfully done that it all fuses together seamlessly, like one big fantastic tale.

I haven’t read LaPlante before, so am quite blown away by her writing. It is not that she winds her sentences a special way, or uses big words; she just has a way of getting to the heart of the matter, of baring her characters to us, by the way they walk and talk, the way they wear their hair, or obsessively mop up spills. A cardinal rule of story-telling is “to show” and not “to tell”. And I have to say, LaPlante excels at “showing”.

Given the tabloid-y nature of the subject, this book could have gone south in the hands of a less accomplished author. With LaPlante’s considerable skill though, “A Circle of Wives” is a hard-to-put-down read.