Review: The Wrong Woman - JP Pomare

Review: The Wrong Woman - JP Pomare - July 2022 

Picked up at Xanadu Book Exchange in Papamoa one of my regular haunts for swapping reads. In fact, I'm heading back there tomorrow, and honestly, there's something extra satisfying about finding a great thriller in a secondhand pile, isn't there?

Reid never planned to go back. Driven out of his hometown under circumstances he'd sooner forget, he'd made peace with the distance  until a PI job for an insurance agency pulled him right back to the place he'd left behind. He books a hotel, tells himself it'll be straightforward. An open-and-shut case. In and out.

But life and small towns rarely cooperate as we all know being readers .

What Reid walks into is a tangle of secrets that grows thornier with every thread he pulls. There's a Professor with a wandering eye, a car crash that raises more questions than it answers, and two missing teenage girls whose disappearances seem unconnected until they don't. One girl is from the wrong side of town, the other is the Chief of Police's daughter. And therein lies one of this novel's sharpest observations: when a rich girl goes missing, the whole machinery of justice roars to life. When it's someone less visible, the silence is deafening. It makes you wonder whether the resources being poured into the search are chasing the villain of the story rather than the innocent party who simply found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Pomare structures his story around three women whose lives have been quietly knotted together by the same man. The wife, the mistress, and the bystander. Each of them carrying the weight of choices that weren't entirely their own. The novel's central question hums beneath every chapter: which of them is "the wrong woman"? The one betrayed? The one who knew better? Or the one who never asked to be part of any of it?

It's a question worth sitting with, because JP Pomare doesn't hand you the answer cheaply.

Which of the three women is truly The Wrong Woman? Find out in this gripping thriller from one of New Zealand's crime writers The Wrong Woman by JP Pomare.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3P0sGeT