I was folding laundry, which feels appropriate now. A basket of mismatched socks, a faint smell of detergent. My phone buzzed with the ARC approval. I read the first line: Jodie, sitting in an interrogation room, covered in blood, calmly giving the police cleaning tips about their desk. I laughed. Then I stopped laughing.
This is the problem with Natalie Barelli’s The Housewife. It makes you laugh at things you shouldn’t find funny. And then it makes you wonder what that says about you.
What Jodie Wants and What She Hides
Jodie is not a good person. I mean that as a compliment.
She marries Dr. Roy Davies, a famous psychologist, after a whirlwind romance. She moves into his Beverly Hills mansion. She bakes perfect pies. She cleans obsessively. His friends think she’s a gold-digger. The housekeeper Marie watches her like a hawk. The first wife Deborah’s photos are everywhere.
Here’s the thing. Jodie didn’t marry for money. She didn’t marry for love. She married because Deborah was her sister. And Deborah died by suicide six months ago. And Jodie spent five years in prison before that.
She thinks Roy killed Deborah. She can’t go to the police because her own record would make her unbelievable. So she does what she knows how to do. She infiltrates. She observes. She waits.
The tension in the first half is almost unbearable. Every scene with Roy feels like watching someone step onto thin ice. Jodie’s internal voice is sharp and strange. She narrates social situations like an alien who has studied human behavior from a manual. It’s funny and unsettling at the same time.
I kept thinking: what would I do in her place? The honest answer is nothing. I would be paralyzed. Jodie is not.
The Crystal That Holds the History
There’s a moment about halfway through. Jodie is in the kitchen, and Marie is watching her. Jodie is polishing a Steuben glass. She describes the weight of it, the way the light catches the crystal. She says something about how you can feel the history in objects.
This is the image the book orbits. The perfect house. The perfect objects. The dead wife’s crystal. The new wife’s hands.
Barelli’s craft is in the details. The way Roy’s friends talk down to Jodie. The way Marie’s loyalty to Deborah feels like a wall. The way Jodie’s cleaning becomes a form of control when everything else is slipping.
But here’s where I got uncomfortable. The book has a dark humor that sometimes feels like it’s laughing at the wrong things. Jodie’s sarcasm is sharp. She says things like, “Oh is that why she shot herself in the face then?” It lands. It’s brutal. But I wondered if the author was too charmed by her own protagonist’s edge.
There’s a question the book doesn’t fully answer. Is Jodie’s darkness something she earned from prison and loss? Or is it just who she is? I think Barelli wants us to see both. But the second half of the book started losing me.
Where the Book Stumbles and Where It Lands
The second half gets repetitive. Jodie digs. She finds evidence. She digs more. Some twists become predictable. I guessed the real perpetrator before the reveal, which is fine for thriller veterans but disappointing when the first half was so tight.
The legal-thriller elements that get added near the end felt like they belonged in a different book. The resolution stretched believability. I wanted a cleaner ending, something that matched the sharpness of Jodie’s voice.
But here’s the thing. The ending made me look back at earlier moments differently. That’s the mark of a decent thriller. Not a great one. But a solid one.
Jodie is the kind of character I’ll remember. Not for her goodness. For her stubbornness. She refuses to be the victim. She refuses to be the perfect wife. She refuses to be anything except what she is. A woman with a past that should have broken her, using that brokenness as a weapon.
The strongest cage in this book isn’t the Beverly Hills mansion. It isn’t Roy’s control. It’s the expectation that Jodie should be grateful for what she has. That she should smile and bake pies and pretend.
She doesn’t pretend.
The question the book left me with: what would you do if the only way to get justice was to become someone you barely recognize?
