‘The Final Wife’ by Jenny Blackhurst

Published by Canelo.co,
17 April 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-80436511-3 (PB)

Jenny Blackhurst, a popular bestselling British writer, has fifteen titles on Goodreads. Best known for her exciting crime fiction, in her latest offering—The Final Wife—she has produced the type of story lauded as twisty and propulsive, a page-turner that is an ideal beach read. It is, indeed, unputdownable. In perfectly crafted prose, Blackhurst skilfully guides the reader down one false turning after another, gripping our attention till the surprising conclusion.  

The Final Wife concerns love, infidelity and jealousy in their many guises. The cover of the paperback version offers two clues to what lurks within. Under the photo of a woman in the distance, sheltering from a cloudy sky under an umbrella, are two phrases: ‘She wasn’t the first’ and, below that, the phrase ‘She will be the last.’ These teasers signal the story will concern a man who cheats, and women determined to stop him.

That man is Luke Whitney—a handsome, confident, and wealthy plastic surgeon—who is serially unfaithful. But he gets his comeuppance. The gruesome description of Luke Whitney’s death, planned and executed by an unnamed narrator, occupy the first pages of the book. Following that distressing scene, it appears the author gives us the perpetrator’s identity. On the arrival of the police, the victim’s second wife, Anne, freely admits that she has murdered him.

Blackhurst adopts the trendy habit of dividing her narrative between several narrators and several timelines. The perspective switches between a police officer named Rebecca Dance, the first wife, Rose Whitney, the second wife, Anne Whitney, and Pippa Kent, a much younger woman Luke has used and betrayed. The personalities of these four women contrast pleasingly. Rebecca Dance is an attractively vulnerable if prickly character who finds curious discrepancies in Anne’s confession. Anne is the young and beautiful former waitress who wants to be convicted for her husband’s murder. Rose, who’s indulged in too much plastic surgery to have retained her looks, seems devastated by his death. She and Luke had met at Oxford as fellow students and, such were his charms, despite posing beauty, intelligence and ability, she had soon abandoned any thoughts of embarking on a career of her own, devoting herself to pleasing Luke. As for Pippa, although she seems intent on becoming Luke’s third wife, we learn a past tragedy has spurred her into aiming for quite a different goal.

Nothing and nobody are what they seem. The plot skips merrily along, moving from the past to the present and back again, with memories illuminating motives, and the author throwing in one surprise revelation after another. But the novel may be a victim of its own glib cleverness. Can we care for any of these individuals so deftly described? Are we moved by their troubles? Did Luke deserve to be killed for his bad behaviour?

Blackhurst is wonderfully adept at writing in a seemingly casual style which conceals considerable effort and at managing the convoluted plot twists. It is all masterful but may defeat its purpose, if the author’s purpose is to engage our emotions and interest. When the last page is read, will the characters and their charades quickly fade from our consciousness? Still, if it’s transitory pleasure that is required, The Final Wife is highly recommended.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.

Jenny Blackhurst grew up in Shropshire where she still lives with her husband and children. Growing up she spent hours reading and talking about crime novels – writing her own seemed like natural progression. Inspired by the emotions she felt around her own son’s birth, How I Lost You was Jenny’s thrilling debut crime novel. 

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.  

Lea O'Harra – Mystery writer