The premise of S. E. Reed’s upcoming domestic thriller The First Wives is pretty fun: Hannah is a crypto billionaire’s wife, twin mom, and a trad wife Insta influencer. You know I love influencers and social media in fiction, especially in thrillers. Her billionaire husband is gone half the time for mysterious work reasons.

She becomes friends with Sophia, who moves in next door. Sophia is sad because her billionaire husband also has a second family, so he’s gone half the time to be with them.

The First Wives has so many things I like, including influencer fakes and backstory secrets, all in an upscale lifestyle-p0rn setting, but unfortunately, the story’s going exactly where you think it’s going to go, right from the start.

I sometimes say that something is off with a mystery’s pacing, but I can’t full explain why it didn’t work for me. Here, I can. We kept discovering another twisted action from Sophia, and then Hannah would be shocked for a minute, and just go about her life. Man, it sure is weird that the next-door neighbor got plastic surgery to look like me! That she snuck into my kids’ school! That she said she was moving to the UK, but now she’s in her bikini drinking wine at my house with my husband! Oh well, time to pick the twins up from school. It’s so weird.

I know this is a popular style, but I personally don’t really like the flash-forward opening in thrillers now. It’s that scene set either at a police station or a funeral, in which an unnamed character references  another unnamed character’s tragic and mysterious death. I don’t like this, it’s way too close to the Unmentionable Secret Plot Device, but even worse because in a prologue, by definition, I don’t know or care about the characters involved (yet?). This opening style is so popular, I know I’m in minority here, but just write “thriller” on the cover, we don’t need a vague flash-forward to tell us someone’s gonna die in a thriller.

So when readers get to the dramatic murder scene, we already know who’s going to die. It’s been pretty clearly signposted because this book is, you know, a murder thriller, which took a lot of the tension and stakes away. I also though the ending felt rushed — after a sloooooooow buildup, for ages, then she just shoots the guy point-blank, no sneaky evidence-planting or establishing and alibi or anything, then off-stage lawyers clean it all up. If that was an option this whole time, then the stakes are even lower. Oh well.