A Total Waste of Time 
 "The perfect marriage or the perfect lie?" cries the book cover. Amazon even includes the sales pitch as part of the title: "Behind Closed Doors: the most shocking psychological thriller you will read all year." Don't believe it. It is atrociously written, and any potential suspense is telegraphed so far ahead that it is deja vu before you get anywhere near it. Like the Emperor's new clothes, there is simply no story there. 
 It opens in the present with the perfect wife, Grace Angel, serving the perfect dinner in her perfect home to two not-quite-so-perfect couples from their English village, while her perfect husband of a year, domestic abuse lawyer Jack Angel, looks admiringly on. Even without the shout-out on the cover, the thing positively yells Stepford Wives. Grace may not be literally an automaton, but it is clear that she is totally in her husband's power. 
 Alternate chapters take us back to the past. Grace has a younger sister, Millie, a teenager with Down Syndrome, and Jack first won her heart when he came upon Millie in the park and treated her with courtesy and charm. His courtship of Grace proceeds very quickly and soon they are engaged. I suppose you could excuse Grace passing over the first few warning signs, but the later ones are so obvious that you lose all sympathy with a normally competent woman (she is a buyer for Harrods, for heaven's sake!) who is so supine in giving the benefit of the doubt to a man who, let's face it, she still hardly knows. And when the mask was finally removed at page 120 or so, the story became so melodramatic, so totally implausible, as to make me throw the book down in disgust. 
 I have no intention of reading the remaining 200 pages. I am sure that Grace will suffer a lot more of Jack's psychopathic domination before the book is out. No doubt there will be minor details I hadn't anticipated. Somehow, despite all appearances, she will find the gumption to try to escape. I suppose there will be reversals and cruel disappointments, enough nail-biters to keep addicted readers on the edge of their seats. And, given the genre, I assume she will finally break free. But the only people who will cheer are those who could find some strength in her personality from the beginning, or who could for one moment believe in the reality of the husband who held her a virtual captive. Don't count me among them.