The opening line of Kimberly McCreight’s new novel, Someone Else’s Husband, pulls you right in: “Getting away with it.” The “it” is murder in cold blood.
But who says this? The story is told in alternating chapters featuring the book’s several main characters before and after the murder. Readers will likely keep changing their minds about who the killer might be.
The victim is said to be a woman, Frankie Callahan, a lively, attractive young artist. Entangling relationships, business and romantic, come to light, as the story follows Frankie early on, when she decides to join an expedition to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. She needs a challenge to clarify her life. What’s impressive is McCreight’s linking the murder to the dangerous climb up Kilimanjaro, where one of the group does not make it down alive.
Someone Else’s Husband is both an authentic adventure tale of the hazards of the Kilimanjaro climb, and a totally believable story of passionate friendship that springs up, out of the blue, threatening the domestic and financial stability of one of the climbers - a powerful, highly revered Greenwich-based mover and shaker, Richard Falk.
When Frankie signed up for the expedition, she didn’t realize the other hikers were all men, college buddies, in fact, who had taken challenging trips together before. She had the means to go on the trip because of a shadowy experience years earlier when she was raped by a politico, now a U.S. Senator, who gave her hush money in exchange for a Non-Disclosure Agreement. She believes it’s he who is harassing her now with recent threatening calls.
Though everyone behaves on the expedition, romantic undercurrents do emerge between Frankie and Richard, the straight-arrow married man with a wealthy, elegant, adoring wife and three kids back home. But Frankie fascinates him, largely because she’s an artist, his hidden desire, and far from the cut-throat financial world he has come to despise. It’s his steely wife Gretchen, however, who gets the opening chapter – the police have come to arrest Richard for murder.
McCreight includes Q&A transcripts of Dateline interrogations by police and aggressive assistant district attorneys, with each chapter revealing more information. Early suspicions are confirmed – along with increasing doubts – as short italicized first-person ruminations are injected into the narrative - except you don’t know who they belong to.
—The author McCreight knows how to play the Agatha Christie game – shifting points of view that suggest possible motives in this character, or that, while keeping up the tension of the ascent up the mountain. She also knows her way around investment banking -- as she refers to it, “It was a pie-eating contest where the prize was always more pie.”
In a back-page acknowledgment, McCreight notes that she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, but adds that her fictional characters do not resemble her real-life hiking companions. But she obviously saw potential in her experience. As she expresses it in a dedication note, the book is “For the climbers of mountains, large and small. May we all someday find what we’re looking for.” An epigraph follows– from Oscar Wilde: “Hearts are made to be broken.” Add both, and you have Someone Else’s Husband, which, despite a soap-opera-sounding title, delivers a compelling tale. And what a resolution!
