Three close friends. One dark secret they are each ashamed of. And a series of murders they are uniquely qualified to solve.
The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives by Elizabeth Arnott is set during a sweltering summer in Los Angeles in 1966. Young women are being killed. And the three women investigating the crimes, Margot, Elsie, and Beverly, have something in common that gives them an edge: all three were married to serial killers. Not the men doing the killing, but the women who lived with them, slept next to them night after night, and had no idea what their husbands were up to.
Have I got your attention? The title and premise certainly got mine. I read this book on a flight from California to New York and was completely engrossed.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Elizabeth and I talk about her long-standing fascination with true crime, why she set the novel in pre-profiling 1960s California, and the challenge of writing about killers before the term “serial killer” even existed. We get into how killers compartmentalise, why spouses so often don’t suspect, and how Elizabeth crafted three very distinct women while balancing dark subject matter with some welcome levity. We also talk about the “ticking clock” chapters written from a captive’s perspective, what those scenes are really saying about women’s everyday safety, and what it’s like writing freely versus under contract.
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