The Perfect Wife

Chapter 1

You re having that dream again, the one where you and Tim are in Jaipur for Diwali. Everywhere you look, every doorway and window, there are lanterns and candles, firecrackers and fairy lights. Courtyards have become flickering pools of flame, their entrances surrounded by intricate designs of colored rice paste. Drums and cymbals throb and sizzle. Surrendering to the din and confusion, you surge with the crowd through a market, the stallholders urging platters of sweets on you from every side. On an impulse you stop at a stall where a woman decorates faces with beautiful Hindi patterns, the smell of sandalwood from her brushes mingling with the acrid, savory cordite from the firecrackers and the aroma of kaaju, roasting cashew nuts. As she paints you, deft and quick, a cluster of young men dance past, their faces painted blue, their muscular torsos bare, then come back, dancing just for you, their expressions deadly serious. And then, the final touch, she paints a bindi on your forehead, right between your eyes, telling you how the scarlet dot marks you out as married, a woman with all the knowledge of the world. But I m not, you protest, almost pulling away, fearful you re going to offend some local sensibility, and then you hear Tim s laugh and see the box he produces from his pocket and even before he goes down on one knee, right here in the midst of all this noise and mayhem, you know this is it, he s really going to do it, and your heart overflows.

Abbie Cullen, he begins, ever since you erupted into my life, I ve known we have to be together.

And then you re waking up.

Every part of you hurts. Your eyes are the worst, the bright lights searing into your skull, the ache in your brain connecting with the stiffness in your neck, soreness all the way down your spine.

Machines beep and whir. A hospital? Were you in an accident? You try to move your arms. They re stiff you can barely bend your elbows. Painfully, you reach up and touch

The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Before and Believe Me, JP Delaney has previously written fiction under other names.

The Perfect Wife blew my mind! What a wonderful and unique thriller. I haven t been able to put it down since it arrived, and now that I ve finished I can t stop thinking about it! Those last lines . . . wow! JP Delaney has outdone himself with his latest dynamic, razor-sharp, and thought-provoking thriller. The Perfect Wife is a cutting-edge suspense novel unlike any you ve read before. . . . A must-read! Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl

A twisty, completely original psychological thriller that grabs you from the start and doesn t let go until the very end. Karen Cleveland, New York Times bestselling author of Need to Know
 
Seriously, amazingly, awesomely brilliant . . . speculative fiction mixed up with a mind-bendingly twisty psycho thriller! I devoured it. C. J. Tudor, author of The Chalk Man

A tour de force . . . The Perfect Wife is a chilling and uniquely disturbing twenty-first-century twist on the unreliable narrator that makes for a compulsive and deeply thought-provoking book. It asks troubling questions about selfhood and souls and what makes us human, and plays them out in a compelling psychological thriller. Cara Hunter, author of Close to Home

Readers . . . will be rewarded with a fresh take on the domestic thriller that will leave them satisfied. Booklist

Puts almost perfectly a high-tech spin on the stories of Frankenstein and Pygmalion with a tinge of the Stepford wives. . . . The intriguing plot leads to a chilling and surprising finale that perfectly caps The Perfect Wife. Associated Press

Artificial intelligence might seem like a risky plot device, and the premise of the novel itself is tricky at best, but Delaney pulls it off brilliantly, with an intoxicating knack for suspense. This is the kind of novel ugly words like unputdownable were invented for. With the tale of