The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon is a fictionalized recreation of the very real disappearance of NY Supreme Court Judge Joseph Crater on summer evening in 1930.
From the very first chapter, before the first chapter, actually. From the opening excerpt, I was hooked, curious about what might have happened to this man I had never before heard of. The descriptions were sumptuous, coating everything in this very noir perspective of fast talking investigators, seedy clubs, and cigarettes dangling from everyone's lips.
As the novel progresses, Lawhon does a brilliant job of intertwining the three main characters perspectives, sharing how they have come to be a part of this story, and how they each view the other. I also really loved all of the detail shared about the Crater's maid, Maria, and her second job as a seamstress. It reminded me very much of my own time spent as an alteration's gal in Athens, cutting and sewing and perfecting the fit of a garment for clients.
One thing I was not a huge fan of throughout this novel was how Lawhon handled flashback scenes. At the start of each chapter, we are given a date and a place in which the action is happening. However, interspersed throughout those same chapters, the reader is often sent backwards even further into the past. we are given the date that we are returning to, but then we are dumped back into the present without being told there was a time shift again. This led to a few moments of confusion as I tried to gather context clues as to where I had wound up. Also, the moments that Lawhon chose to go even further back in time often felt unnecessary to the plot of the story or the learning of new information that we hadn;t already been presented in a different way.
I must admit, I had a feeling I knew the answer to "what happened?" or at least who was involved in Crater's disappearance from a very early point. I had hoped that Lawhon might have subverted my hunch, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. This isn't Lawhon's fault in the least. Reading The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress simply left me wondering. . . are mystery novels meant for me? Especially if I seem to get to the end and always leave feeling a bit disappointed and underwhelmed?
Regardless, this was an incredibly fun read in every other aspect. I absolutely tore through the story in only two days, and I walked away with a new mystery stuck in my mind: What ever did happen to Judge Joseph Crater?