A stay-at-home dad, who feel emasculated by his workaholic wife and lack of career, is drawn into the case of a drowned man when the death is ruled an accident. He suspects foul play because the man was someone he knew before being laid off from his job in finance, a Wall Street investor, and he talked to him the day of his death. Is he onto a murder or is he just desperate to prove himself?

The book takes the the recent tropes of the domestic thrillers like The Girl On The Train, and flips the gender so that the unreliable narrator is the male stay at home dad, and the workaholic spouse is the wife. Into that plot and genre are tossed themes of modern masculinity, finding meaning and purpose, and fatherhood. It’s a debut novel from an author who worked in the finance sector, so I guess it’s a case of writing what you know, to some extent.

The novel takes the first person voice, as a lot of novels in this genre do. This is generally because the narrator is meant to be unreliable, and the author can play around with what the narrator might be hiding from us or what they don’t know they know, or that kind of thing. Our main character in this story is Peter Greene and he’s absolutely insufferable. I cannot tell if his constant whiney, narcissistic and unself-aware storytelling is meant to be funny or unreliable because of his self absorption. In the opening pages, we learn that within a few weeks of his wife giving birth, he fakes having jury duty for months, actual months, and leaves her alone with the newborn because he isn’t enjoying new parenthood. When his abandonment of her makes her cry, he interprets this as being “pissed” at him and tells us she’s like that a lot and also bosses him around (ie asks him to do things at home, or checks that he’s done them). He then says he senses a coldness towards himself from her. As though she’s the heartless one. He then says, to “comfort” her, he feeds and changes his own child for that one night. Surely, since he’s been out all day, he would be doing that anyway? Him taking care of his own offspring is his responsibility, not comforting another person. He also obsesses over not working. By that I don’t mean he looks for work or anything, more that he interprets everyone’s actions or behaviour towards him as being about his masculinity and social standing, based off his not working. It’s creepy. He’s deeply ashamed of being a stay-at-home Dad. The reason that I’m not sure if this behaviour is meant to be accepted or rejected by the reader is that there’s no payoff for this in the book, like it’s not a hinge that the twist ending turns on or anything. It’s not really funny either. It’s just like watching a bunch of those depressing relationship red flag videos on Instagram. Which I guess are really popular, so is that who the author is appealing to? Or the people in them?

Either way, I personally found it made for a difficult read. Especially because the other characters felt a little underwritten and every single one was against him in this boo. Perhaps it was intentional since that’s how the character sees the world, as though he’s a victim, but it made it all a bit repetitive for me. The dialogue isn’t great, and could use some development, which is part of why people around him felt so flat. Overall it suffers from what I feel like a lot of recent reads do: it needs a really good edit to tighten it up, this book could have been a lot shorter and more tightly plotted. It’s overlong.

The idea of having a narcisstic narrator and the twist ending, even the idea of the domestic thriller genre with the gender roles reversed are all fine ideas, and some of the writing here shows promise, but these elements needed to be more fully developed to work well.  It’s slow paced, struggling story with a very unpleasant lead character, and the parts about the finance world are not made interesting enough for the average reader.

Read It If: I didn’t love this one. The ending is not bad at all, it’s just a bit of a slog getting there.

Thank you to HBG Canada for the copy of this book for review.