Kill Your Husbands by Jack Heath

Publisher's Synopsis

Three couples, friends since high school, rent a luxurious house in the mountains for an unplugged weekend of drinking and bushwalking. No internet, no phones, no stress. On the first night, the topic of partner-swapping comes up. It's a joke - at first.

Not everyone is keen, but an agreement is made. The lights will be turned out. The three women will go into the three bedrooms. The three men will each pick a room at random. It won't be awkward later, because they won't know who they've slept with - or can pretend they don't.

But when the lights come back on, one of the men is dead. No one will admit to being his partner. The phones still don't work, and now the car key is missing. They're stranded. And the killer is just getting started ...

My Review of Kill Your Husbands by Jack Heath

Set in and near the fictional central New South Wales of Warrigal, Senior Constable Kiara Lui is once again on the job, hoping to solve her first murder case as lead investigator. It’s only been a year since the events chronicled in Kill Your Brother and she is still in the process of helping her girlfriend Elise to deal with the trauma suffered back then. Jack Heath has provided us with an entertaining murder mystery and has managed to put Kiara and Elise through another relationship testing scenario.

The prospect of a weekend away proves too good an opportunity to pass up for three couples, friends from high school who are now hitting their mid-thirties and looking for some direction in their respective lives. But the weekend doesn’t go as planned and Kill Your Husbands becomes quite the black comedy thriller complete with unexpected twists.

When the police show up, days after the fateful weekend, two men are dead, a husband and wife have locked themselves in a bedroom, one woman is a traumatised mess and another woman has gone missing. Something has gone seriously wrong in this isolated holiday house and we’re about to spend the rest of the book recounting the events leading up to the fateful night, not to mention the aftermath.

Isla and Oscar, Clementine and Cole and Felicity and Dom are together in a difficult to reach house, high in the mountains and out of mobile phone range. There’s clearly some underlying tensions going on between some in the party, but nothing could prepare them for the results of a seemingly innocent game of Truth or Dare.

Flicking timelines between the night of the incident and a week later when the police investigation, led by Senior Constable Kiara Lui, tries to unravel what the heck went on. This becomes a perplexing case. We know there are at least 2 dead among the six but exactly who died and how remains unclear for a significant portion of the book. We’re left to try to unravel the frayed strings along with Lui which turns out to be far from a straightforward task.

Just as important, and just as significant as the murder investigation is the personal relationship between Kiara and Elise. Kiara’s decision to organise a holiday stay in the murder house with Elise as her guest is a questionable move, but one that certainly adds a further level of intrigue and tension to the story. Putting Elise this close to a murder case so soon after the trauma she’d recently been through was definitely stretching the friendship. 

The success of Kill Your Husbands lies around the complexity of each of the characters involved and their underlying flaws and frailties. Jack Heath does an outstanding job of initially painting each of his main characters as shallow and carefree, up for a good time and ready to party. But by digging deeper and deeper into their psyches we begin to understand there are more sinister realities at play and some may be carrying some kind of ulterior motive with resentment lurking close to the surface of more than one friend.

The diverse cast of characters means that there’s ample opportunity to create doubt over who the murderer may be. Heath has also chucked in a slew of twists and unexpected turns to ensure that we’re navigating the waters of a rewarding domestic thriller.

The events from the earlier book are merely hinted at to create a frame of reference, so you’re going to be able to enjoy this as a stand alone thriller.