Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen are American co-authors whose domestic thriller The Wife Between Us became a bestseller for its propulsive plotting and carefully engineered twists.

Greer Hendricks spent years as a literary editor at Simon & Schuster before turning to fiction writing, and her editorial instincts are visible throughout The Wife Between Us, written with journalist and novelist Sarah Pekkanen. Published in 2018, the novel is structured around a central misdirection — the reader believes they understand the situation between a first and second wife, and then does not — and the twist is handled with more control than most books in the genre manage. The writing is smooth and commercial, built for speed, and the pacing rarely lets up.

The book operates comfortably within the post-Gone Girl tradition of domestically set psychological suspense with unreliable narrators, and it is one of the better examples of that form. Hendricks and Pekkanen understand that a thriller’s structure needs to be doing real work — that the information released to the reader must be controlled carefully — and The Wife Between Us demonstrates that skill throughout. The wealthy New York setting and its social textures are drawn with specificity.

The novel’s limitations are also characteristic of the genre: character depth takes a back seat to mechanism, and once the structural twist has done its work, the book’s emotional resonance is relatively thin. Readers who prioritise psychological complexity over plotting efficiency may find it less satisfying than its bestseller status suggests. But as a well-crafted thriller that delivers on its central promise, Hendricks and Pekkanen execute with confidence.