Review – As Long As We Both Shall Live by Joann Chaney

As Long as We Both Shall Live by Joann Chaney
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
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What happens when you're really, truly done making your marriage work? You can't be married to someone without sometimes wanting to bash them over the head...As Long As We Both Shall Live is JoAnn Chaney's wicked, masterful examination of a marriage gone very wrong, a marriage with lots of secrets...

"My wife! I think she's dead!" Matt frantically tells park rangers that he and his wife, Marie, were hiking when she fell off a cliff into the raging river below. They start a search, but they aren't hopeful: no one could have survived that fall. It was a tragic accident.

But Matt's first wife also died in suspicious circumstances. And when the police pull a body out of the river, they have a lot more questions for Matt.

Detectives Loren and Spengler want to know if Matt is a grieving, twice-unlucky husband or a cold-blooded murderer. They dig into the couple's lives to see what they can unearth. And they find that love's got teeth, it's got claws, and once it hitches you to a person, it's tough to rip yourself free.

So what happens when you're done making it work?

This book was a really fun way to spend a cold winter weekend.

And maybe that was love. The body’s chemical reaction to finding a person who irritates you less than everyone else.

Matt and his wife Marie decide to go hiking. They’re inexperienced, so no one is surprised when Matt comes running down the mountain alone, screaming for help, because his wife was trying to take a selfie and fell over the edge of the cliff. At first, the police seem almost bored – another silly, inexperienced hiker falling over the cliff. They start their search for Marie’s body almost on auto-pilot, barely seeming to even recognize that it’s a probably-dead human being they’re looking for.

Then more information comes to light. Matt’s first wife, Janice, also died under mysterious circumstances, and he was a suspect in that death for a while, before being cleared mainly because the police just couldn’t find any way to charge him. What are the odds one man would be so unlucky as to have 2 wives die under strange and violent circumstances?

I thought I had this figured out, and I was right about most of it, but there were a few big points I missed that made the reading of this even more enjoyable than I had expected. Every time one piece of the story was explained and solved, it triggered another question that needed to be answered. Even by the end, I don’t think we had the whole story. That’s not because Joann Chaney didn’t answer them throughout the book, it’s because we were getting the story from the points of view of some very unreliable narrators, and there’s no way to think we had the whole story.

There was a secondary storyline that I didn’t think was necessary and took me out of the main story more than I would have liked, but it also didn’t detract from the book overall. Bottom line – get this book, pour a glass of wine, and strap in!