I received an advance reader copy of this book through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. When I first began reading this book, I didn’t think I would like the book. The premise of an emotional support robot with artificial intelligence is definitely not on my usual reading list. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I actually was mesmerized by this book. Please don’t automatically pass over this book because you think it’s science fiction. It is so much more!

I loved Delaney's previous book so I was thrilled to receive an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I usually don't like sci-fi books, but from the first page I was taken in with the story, unsure of where it was going to go and quickly found myself immersed with the details of the characters. I read a good amount of thrillers and can usually figure out the story and I was way off with this one and I love that it kept me guessing until the very end. I don't want to give too much away, but thought the storyline with the autistic child was real and heart wrenching.

When is the next book out from Delaney? :)

Abbie awakens with no memory of who she is or how she landed in this unsettling condition. The man by her side claims to be her husband. He's an icon of the tech world, the founder of a lucrative robotics company. He tells Abbie that she is a gifted artist, an avid surfer, a loving mother to their young son, and the perfect wife. He says she had a terrible accident five years ago, and that, through a huge technological breakthrough, she has been brought back from the abyss. She is a miracle of science. 

But as Abbie pieces together memories of her marriage, she begins questioning her husband's motives--and his version of events. Can she trust him when he says he wants them to be together forever? And what really happened to Abbie half a decade ago?

This is a must read. The actual thriller begins in the second half of the book. Certain parts of the plot might be unconventional but i loved unraveling the story and finding out the truth. Amazing read, definitely recommend.

This is a tough one.

I've read a couple of people's reviews of this book. They also struggled to find a category to put it in. Some call it sci-fi and others call it a mystery. I'm going to call it "intriguing".

Until the final couple of chapters, I was all set to give this book five stars. It's cleverly done, easy to follow, has great character development, spins a good mystery . . . . it's a really fine book. And then came the ending. I didn't see it coming and wasn't too happy with it. A more traditional ending might have tied up the loose ends a bit better.

Ending aside, this is a really fine read. I've read a few Delaney books now and been very pleased with all of them.

Keep 'em coming . . . and tell us who you are!

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. The Perfect Wife is due for publication in August 2019.

First, I would like to point out that second-person POV is the most difficult for an author to use. Abbie's chapters are written in second person and J.P. Delaney does a fantastic job of immersing the reader in the story in this way.

Admittedly, the beginning and the ending of this book frustrated me. I am not particularly a fan of sci-fi, and after reading the synopsis of this book, sci-fi is not the genre you would initially anticipate. (After reading the synopsis again, I suppose it makes sense, but it is not immediately apparent.) I must admit that I was turned off by the sci-fi element that is so crudely introduced to you in the first three chapters. I recall being equally turned off by the beginning of Stephenie Meyers' "The Host," but I ended up absolutely loving that book, so much so that I was inspired to draw again for the first time in years after reading it. But I digress. The point is, don't let the sudden and unexpected reveal that Abbie is in fact a robot—who has been constructed by a mourning husband to be an emotionally capable replacement for the wife he lost—cause you do turn away from this book. As Abbie's awareness grows and she experiences memories of real-life Abbie and discovers clues that indicate that real-life Abbie and Tim's marriage was not what it appeared to be on the surface, you will struggle to put the story down. I finished this book in two short sittings.

As for my problem with the ending, it simply doesn't make sense. Abbie's chapter 83 is not congruent with the narrator's chapter 'TWENTY-SIX,' which immediately follows chapter 83 in the dual storyline. I read these chapters three times each to see if I was just missing something, but I'm certain they are contradictory. Two different accounts of what happened are given here, and what happens in Abbie's chapter makes what happens in the narrator's description in the other chapter impossible. In fact, there are major plot holes pertaining to the ending as a whole, but I do not want to put any spoilers here. I feel that the ending, and these two chapters in particular, deserve a second look and major editing before the final book is released. This disparity has left me feeling incomplete and has made it difficult to rate the book.

Considering the storyline itself, I feel that robot Abbie is nothing like real-life Abbie, and this poses a problem. The characters in the story are taken aback by how "similar" robot Abbie is, but let's be frank. Real-life Abbie wouldn't put up with all the crap Tim pulls on her. Robot Abbie is just the “perfect wife” she has been told to be and lets Tim get away with far too much. However, the rest of the storyline is actually really good. The psychological struggle that robot Abbie experiences is relatable for anyone who questions their self-worth or relationships with others. She finds an inner strength as she becomes more independent, and she becomes more human even as she increasingly accepts her non-humanness.

After writing this review, I feel that 3/5 stars are appropriate until the ending is edited to make sense and be consistent with the rest of the story. I want to give the book a better rating, but I find that I am simply just too bothered by the inattention that was paid to details at the conclusion. This book could be exceptional with just a little more editing.

#netgalley #theperfectwife

This book took me by surprise. The description sounded interesting and I thought it was going to be your ordinary run-of-the-mill psychological thriller. It most definitely was not! It brought up a lot of interesting and thought-provoking issues of what it means to be human, how technology infiltrates our lives, and more. I stayed up late finishing it and I found myself thinking about this book for days later. The book was very readable and compelling. I have to say that the epigraph and the author's own personal notes at the end (under acknowledgements) made me close the book and just go, "wow."

This book is best for those who don't mind a little (or a LOT) of science fiction and technology in their psychological thrillers---if you like Blake Crouch, this might be up your alley.

Thanks Randomhouse for reaching out with a #netgalley copy of The Perfect Wife. #bookstagrammers preorder now to make sure you have one of the hottest books on the beach this August!

Abbie awakes in what appears to be a hospital, her limbs move strangely, she has bandages, her voice sounds strange and machines are beeping all around her. It must have been an accident...but she’s fine now, right? It’s no spoiler to tell you that you find out in the first chapter that Abbie isn’t Abbie anymore, she’s artificial intelligence—a robot. Don’t worry, author JP Delaney hasn’t veered from his standard thriller genre into sci-fi, Abbie soon finds that her technology genius husband Tim may be hiding as much information from her as he’s downloaded into her new form.

This book delves into the complications that AI brings to life and the culture of misogyny in today’s tech sector even as the mystery of the original Abbie unfolds. This is the first fiction I’ve read that addresses #metoo without making me feel like it was added in just because it’s trending. Delaney makes this central to the suspense and it works.

I’ll be honest, I’m still a tiny bit confused by the last few chapters. I read back over them several times and while I think I’ve got the facts, I’m a bit confused on the timeline and the motivations @jpdelaney can I DM you some questions?

Giving this one 4.5 stars, Delaney just keeps getting better!

The Perfect Wife is one of the most creative stories I've read in ages -- I loved it! While many reviewers refer to it as being in the sci-fi category, I felt differently. I devoured it as a modern day psychological thriller. It begins with the story of a missing, presumed dead young mother and artist named Abbie. As best it can be determined, Abbie went night surfing in Northern California and never returned to shore, nor did her body ever resurface. The police and public opinion are sure her husband, tech genius Tim Scott murdered her, but with no body and no crime scene, he is let off.

Now, the creative part of the novel. After Abbie disappears Tim dedicates himself to recreating her down to the most minute nuance of her personality in the form of a cobot, a companion bot. When in Chapter 1 we meet Abbie, we are actually meeting the Abbie cobot. She is human in almost every way and has all of Abbie's memories and intellect. I think it's essential to stress that as a reader, I never thought of her in any way other than an emotional, feeling being, which is why I didn't find it to be "sci-fi" at all.

As the story progresses, Abbie begins to learn more about her life with Tim and goes searching for the truth behind her disappearance. She also develops a strong maternal bond with their autistic son Danny, which is a fascinating element to this novel. I was hooked every step of the way and read this novel in short order. It never dragged, and each character was extremely well developed. The story is told in second and third person, which makes reading slightly wonky, but it's for a very good reason so just stick with it.

Thank you NetGalley and Ballantine Books/Random House for providing me a digital ARC of The Perfect Wife. I highly recommend it!

I received this title from netgalley in exchange for my honest review/opinion. Well, this book was not what I expect, and different. All in a good way. It was definitely sci-fi meets suspense thriller. In a good way though. Definitely a good read. This author is great.

The Perfect Wife written by JP Delaney is one of my favorite books this year!! Plenty of action, plot twists, and layers in this sci- fi novel that you will have a hard time putting down. I wanted to find out what happened to Abbie and loved her character- loved the deep thinking this thriller inspired in me (Except at 2:00 AM when I could not sleep because I kept analyzing and thinking about what it means to be human, how we define and limit humanity, and about a mother's love. Of course there is much more to think over, that is just to get you started.) Artificial intelligence has fascinated humanity for a long time. I can remember the movies I would watch in the 70's and 80's... and even then topics like human emotion were something that humans were drawn to. Apparently we still are, because all of the moral debates involving data, artificial intelligence kept me coming back for more doses of The Perfect Wife and Abbie, the robot created in her image.

The ending- whew I did not see that coming at all, more surprises than i knew how to handle...felt like a little bit of whiplash but in the best ways. I reread the last section three times!!!!

I am thankful that I was given the opportunity to read The Perfect Wife and want to let JP Delaney, NetGalley, and Random House Publishing Group that I am honored to read such an enjoyable book. As always, my opinions are my own!

I could not stop reading this book!! Such a different and unique story. Also very appropriate to today's technology and what could happen. Part sci-fi, part mystery, part who dun-it, part what the heck is going on. The story of Tim and Abbie is so complex and whenever I thought I had it figured out, here comes the next chapter and I'd be clueless again. Can't wait to read more from this author!

It's difficult to review this book without giving away spoilers. While the author says he tried to avoid a techno-thriller as a genre, it does feel exactly like a techno-thriller. I would best describe this as a literary sci-fi/thriller. What it truly reminded me of was the sci-fi books I read back in the 1980s and 1990s. The sci-fi stories that were written before we fell in love with technology and forgot the dangers associated with it. The story questions the ethics of technology, science, and psychology and will make you question your own beliefs a thousand times. I absolutely couldn't put this one down and I now crave more stories like this. One particular interesting storyline of this book is treatments for autism and the author shares his personal story of having a child with autism and searching for the right treatment at the end of the book.

I liked this book, the writing was solid and the story moved at a good pace. I just could not get over the perfection of the main character--even before her transformation she really could do nothing wrong. The Perfect Wife was very cleverly put together and I wanted to find out just how exactly the author would end this. I thoroughly enjoyed J.P. Delaney's "Believe Me" and "The Perfect Wife" was good but it just did not blow me away like "Believe Me" did. I still recommend to anyone who likes the "Stepford Wives" suspenseful story.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read and review.

Wow! Sci Fi meet suspense and technology! First of all - do NOT start this book when you are going to bed because you will not want to put it down. If this book had been written decades ago, we would have all said it was futuristic, but being written in today's times it makes one wonder and think "could this happen?"

It is a story of family, of relationships of technology and one has to wonder just how far someone might go to hold on to a relationship no matter how twisted or far fetched it might seem. A story of boy (Tim) meets girl (Abbie) and what time and technology and evil can do to a relationship.

In my humble opinion, this is JP Delaney's best work and I look forward to more.

Ok, this book was NOT at all what I was expecting. After reading the first couple chapters I almost put it down but couldn’t. I had read the synopsis but it didn’t fully prepare me for what I was reading. This isn’t my usual go to book. I would say this is more of a sci-fi psychological thriller. If you like psychological thrillers I do believe you will still enjoy this book. Without giving too much away Abbie wakes up as a re-creation of herself thanks to her tech savvy husband, Tim. Abbie has feelings and starts to investigate them on her own only to question what happened in her marriage.
A couple times towards the end of the book it alternated point of views that had me re-reading a couple times to see which version of the person was narrating at the time.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC!!

The description of this book led me to believe I’d be reading about Abbie, a loving mother to a young son and wife to a tech genius. The description says she suffered a terrible accident five years ago and was brought back by a miracle of science only to find that perhaps her husband, Tim, has secrets he’s not sharing with her. I expected a psychological thriller, where the wife outsmarts the husband just in time to bring that sweet, sweet justice (or revenge).

What I didn’t expect was a sci-fi thriller. The genre usually isn’t my cup of tea and I probably would have skipped this book had the description told me that the “Abbie” I’d be getting to know is actually an emotionally intelligent cobot (that’s a companion robot). I almost bailed immediately, but as the real Abbie’s memories and digital footprint were downloaded into cobot Abbie, I got hooked on the story.

Told with a then and now perspective, the past segment is narrated by the collective, while the present is directed at you (cobot Abbie). The novel is timely and heartwarming and made me think really hard about what makes a person human. Is it the empathy, the call to morality or simply having flesh and blood? At the tech company, JP Delaney tackles gender inequality, harassment in the workplace and male entitlement. At home, Tim and Abbie struggle to do what’s best for their son, Danny, who suffers from Childhood disintegrative disorder, a late-onset form of Autism.

Cobot Abbie sets out to find the truth about what happened to Abbie that night, and soon the AI is taking matters into her own hands. Sci-fi lover or not, this is a must-read for anyone who enjoys psychological thrillers.

I was lucky enough to score an ARC of JP Delaney’s next book, The Perfect Wife, from Random House Publishing Group. As a big fan of The Girl Before, I was looking forward to this book and it didn’t disappoint.

This is a story about Abbie and the consequences of her billionaire husband bringing her “back from the dead” after she mysteriously disappears via a highly sophisticated AI Cobot. After her true purpose comes to light and Abbie realized her husbands motive might be more sinister, she is in a race against time to put all of the puzzles pieces together about what really happened to Abbie.

I’m a fan of books with a contemporary setting and touches of science fiction/fantasy/speculative in the storylines. This one definitely ticked that box. It was a perfect balance of interesting plot line that also wove in a mystery/thriller element as well. Delaney was able to dumb down a lot of the tech lingo to make it interesting and easy to understand, while also using it well to move the plot along.

So glad I was able to read this before its release on August 6 and I look forward to more books from this author.

I think we can safely assume that we've all been not-so-patiently waiting to see what JP Delaney does in his follow up to THE GIRL BEFORE (and the underrated BELIEVE ME). Well, folks, here it is, and it does not disappoint. In fact, given the relatively short turnaround here and the propensity of genre authors who have a big hit to churn out drivel as a result of publishing greed that values quantity over quality, it's surprisingly good. I kept thinking to myself, "dammit-- why didn't I think to do this?". It's perhaps slightly better in concept than in practice, and about 80 pages too long, but the concept and plotting are strong enough to carry the moments of weakness. The changing perspectives worked for me throughout the book, but in the final chapters, it seems to go slightly awry, as a third narrative voice ("we") is brought in at the last moment. I think the autism element, and the comparison and relationship between AI-Abbie and Danny is really fascinating and touches on an element of humanity I'd not previously considered. The author's note about his own child at the end makes the journey all the more rewarding, lending what could be just another piece of fiction an added depth that stays with you after putting it down.

In looking at the other reviews, it seems as though people are pushing back at the combination of Sci Fi and Thriller here, but I think they're woven together perfectly. I found the robot Abbie to be an easy character with which to sympathize, but I also possess a certain fascination with the philosophical and moral elements of artificial intelligence. If you're some kind of purist who is closed off to the possibility of empathizing with a being who has been created, then this might not be the best book for you. But for me, it honestly didn't even occur to me that it would be considered Science Fiction at all, because it is so grounded in reality (and so seemingly near). It doesn't read like Octavia Butler or even Margaret Atwood, as it relies on human interest rather than technology, despite the central character being a robot; I found it to be firmly rooted in the same genre and tone as The Girl Before.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the electronic ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I was not expecting this to be sort of a AI (remember that movie) me too, genetic treatment all rolled into one story sort of novel. Even just typing that out, it just doesn't seem to go together but in this book, it somehow does. I mean it really really does. Honestly I don't even want to go into too much detail, because this is a book that I feel the reader needs to go into without any preconcieved notations at all. But let me say this, read it. It is not what you are going to expect it to be in any way shape or form!

I received this as an ARC from netgalley.com

I rated this book four stars because it was a page turner and kept my interest from the beginning to end. It was a good psychological suspense story and I thought I had figured out the twist about 1/2 way through but ended up with another twist at the end!

The characters were totally unlikeable but well developed. My only issue was the AI part which went a little over my head at times.

But it was definitely a different take in the usual wide thrillers and enjoyable!