Waiting for Wednesday by Nicci French, a Mysterious Review.

Review: A middle-aged woman, a wife and mother, is found murdered in her home, her head bashed in, and no evidence to suggest why someone would want to kill her … until the police learn she'd been having an affair with a neighbor for the past ten years, at which point nearly everyone seems to be a suspect, in Waiting for Wednesday, the third mystery in this series featuring psychotherapist Frieda Klein by Nicci French.

Ruth Lennox and Paul Kerrigan had been meeting every Wednesday for nearly a decade. They had a small apartment nearby and apparently no one in either of their families were aware of what was going on. Their respective spouses have alibis and their children — Ruth's son and two daughters and Paul's two sons, all now teenagers — have alibis. Frieda Klein is largely shut out of the investigation, replaced by another therapist, Hal Bradshaw, who has accused her of gross misconduct in a previous case. But she is involved; her niece, Chloë, is dating Ruth's son, Ted. And with Chloë temporarily estranged from her mother and living with Frieda, she's drawn into the family dynamics. Separately, Frieda is on a personal mission to locate a missing girl, someone she's never met and doesn't know, but is puzzled by the mystery of her disappearance.

The two primary storylines in Waiting for Wednesday, while completely separate (and which never overlap), actually work quite well together. The first subplot is a fairly straight-forward police procedural, and a very good one at that. As the police dig further into the lives of Ruth Lennox and Paul Kerrigan, they discover that the secret they've been sharing is not the only one in their families. The investigation is probably drawn out a little too long and could have been resolved just a little sooner, but on the whole it is as interesting as it is unpredictable. (That Frieda actually manages to solve the crime seems a little too fortuitous and coincidental.) The second subplot takes quite a while to get started, and is rather confusing at first, but once going it is riveting. Though there are references to the events of the previous books in this series — there is an overarching plot thread that continues here — these don't interfere with the primary stories. The whole conflict between Hal Bradshaw and Frieda Klein seems a bit out of place, though; it doesn't serve either subplot but does come into play late in the book (in a twisted sort of way). Overall, however, this is a fine mystery, one that takes a while setting the stage for all that is to come, but also one that is definitely worth the time spent seeing how it plays out.

Acknowledgment: Penguin Group provided a copy of Waiting for Wednesday for this review.

Tuesday's Gone
Viking (Hardcover), April 2013
ISBN-13: 9780670025671; ISBN-10: 0670025674

Waiting for Wednesday

A Frieda Klein Mystery by Nicci French