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I listened to It's Always the Husband, by Michele Campbell, narrated by January LaVoy. This starts out with a woman being urged to jump from a cliff (with neither person being identified), then hops back to three roommates becoming friends during their freshman year at a hotshot college. The three are familiar types--the rich bitch, the ambitious townie, and the pathetic poor kid. They seem to do little but sleep around, get high, whine, backstab, and act out, but somehow we're supposed to believe that the three self-centered young women become fast friends. Eventually there's a tragedy.
Then we fast-forward twenty-some years to the present, when we find out who married whom, what happened to everyone. Someone's dead--murder? suicide? accident?--and the others worry that the investigation--by an outsider who's the new police chief--will dredge up the old tragedy. Oh dear.
No one is even remotely likable, either in their freshman personas or in their all-grown-up personas. The boyfriends and husbands of the three women were not well differentiated, and consequently hard to keep straight. The police chief starts out as a potentially interesting character, but then fizzles.
I kept listening to get to the end, in hopes there'd be something wonderfully twisty or exciting to redeem the story, but the twists that came weren't much of anything; it was too hard to care about this set of characters and their motivations. Yuck!
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