The Hunting Wives

When The Hunting Wives begins, its narrator Sophie has a life that seems enviable: a peaceful, serene home with her doting, supportive husband and their adorable toddler Jack. She’s curated a slower-paced life some mothers could only dream of: solo nature jogs, time to transform her well-tended garden into homemade meals, and a passion project she can complete on her own timetable. But, also like many mothers, Sophie spends her days battling boredom and questioning the monotony of marriage and child-rearing. She has an unconscious, long-simmering attraction to the chaos which surrounded her childhood.

Enter Margot, an elegant, fiery, and downright sexy high-society darling. Sophie develops a distant attraction and eventually wills her way into Margot’s orbit, and is quickly invited as the fifth member of the super-secret clique of women who drink, shoot skeet with shotguns, and reveal their proclivity for not-so-innocent extramarital adventures. As Sophie falls further under the hunting wives’ influence, she finds herself tangled up in a web of lies and deceit, all while harboring a secret of her own: her burgeoning attraction to and unhealthy obsession with Margot. When a young woman’s dead body is found on Margot’s property, Sophie’s willingness to protect Margot at all costs threatens to unravel all that Sophie holds dear.

This book is a wild, exciting ride, and it’s refreshing to see a heroine struggle to reconcile what’s expected of her with what she actually wants. I followed Sophie into her mistakes, simultaneously ignoring the warning signs and willing her in vain to stop now and turn around before it’s too late. This story is about a mysterious murder, but it’s also about the mystery of sexuality, security, and the lengths we go to preserve and defend the ones we love. Ultimately, nothing is tied up in a perfect, pretty bow, and I love The Hunting Wives, and its flawed heroine, all the more for it.

Sophie O’Neill left behind an envy-inspiring career and the stressful, competitive life of big-city Chicago to settle down with her husband and young son in a small Texas town. It seems like the perfect life with a beautiful home in an idyllic rural community. But Sophie soon realizes that life is now too quiet, and she’s feeling bored and restless.

Then she meets Margot Banks, an alluring socialite who is part of an elite clique secretly known as the Hunting Wives. Sophie finds herself completely drawn to Margot and swept into her mysterious world of late-night target practice and dangerous partying. As Sophie’s curiosity gives way to full-blown obsession, she slips farther away from the safety of her family and deeper into this nest of vipers.

When the body of a teenage girl is discovered in the woods where the Hunting Wives meet, Sophie finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation and her life spiraling out of control.