Book Spotlight: The Wife, The Maid & The Mistress by Ariel Lawhorn

Last February, I read The Wife, The Maid & The Mistress
by Ariel Lawhorn when it was selected as the monthly book club pick for She Reads and I really enjoyed it! You can find my thoughts on the book here as well as see what the hardcover edition looked like. Yesterday the book was released in paperback with a sassy new cover. I don’t know about you, but I am loving this new cover!!!

A tantalizing
reimagining of a scandalous mystery that rocked the nation in
1930-Justice Joseph Crater’s infamous disappearance-as seen through the
eyes of the three women who knew him best.

They say behind every
great man, there’s a woman. In this case, there are three. Stella
Crater, the judge’s wife, is the picture of propriety draped in long
pearls and the latest Chanel. Ritzi, a leggy showgirl with Broadway
aspirations, thinks moonlighting in the judge’s bed is the quickest way
off the chorus line. Maria Simon, the dutiful maid, has the judge to
thank for her husband’s recent promotion to detective in the NYPD.
Meanwhile, Crater is equally indebted to Tammany Hall leaders and the
city’s most notorious gangster, Owney “The Killer” Madden.

On a
sultry summer night, as rumors circulate about the judge’s involvement
in wide-scale political corruption, the Honorable Joseph Crater steps
into a cab and disappears without a trace. Or does he?

After 39
years of necessary duplicity, Stella Crater is finally ready to reveal
what she knows. Sliding into a plush leather banquette at Club Abbey,
the site of many absinthe-soaked affairs and the judge’s favorite
watering hole back in the day, Stella orders two whiskeys on the
rocks-one for her and one in honor of her missing husband. Stirring the
ice cubes in the lowball glass, Stella begins to tell a tale-of greed,
lust, and deceit. As the novel unfolds and the women slyly break out of
their prescribed roles, it becomes clear that each knows more than she
has initially let on.

With a layered intensity and prose as
effervescent as the bubbly that flows every night, The Wife, the Maid,
and the Mistress is a wickedly entertaining historical mystery that will
transport readers to a bygone era with tipsy spins through subterranean
jazz clubs and backstage dressing rooms. But beneath the Art Deco
skyline and amid the intoxicating smell of smoke and whiskey, the
question of why Judge Crater disappeared lingers seductively until a
twist in the very last pages.

The Wife, The Maid and The Mistress by Ariel Lawhon is one of the She Reads “Books of Fall” reading selection picks.

Head over to the She Reads website to read reviews and related posts of this book, as well as to see what the other “Books of Fall” are.