I didn't enjoy this one as much as Heath's other adult crime novels, but it was still a dramatic and fun read. Not entirely believable, but thoroughly enjoyable for that fact. It started slower, but the twists and turns really picked up at about the half way mark.

Rating of 4.75.

One of my favourite Australian authors, the scarily good Jack Heath, returns with another twisted and brilliant thriller, Kill Your Husbands.

It was supposed to be a relaxing weekend away for three couples, longtime friends since school the six overworked and stressed adults decide to escape their taxing lives for a weekend up in the mountains. With no internet or cell reception, their getaway was supposed to be a quiet time of drinking and bushwalking. However, after the topic of partner-swapping is raised on the first night, the entire mood of the weekend shifts. What starts as a joke soon turns into an elaborate plan to ensure anonymity between partners, with the lights turned off and the men choosing a bedroom at random. No one will know who they’ve been with, and no one will ever be certain if they slept with anyone other than their spouse.

However, when the lights come back on, one of the participants is missing. A search soon reveals their body outside, clearly the victim of a violent attack. With no cell reception and the keys to the cars missing, the remaining five people quickly become suspicious of the other survivors. As the weekend continues and more people begin to disappear and die, old wounds, festering grudges and decaying relationships come to the fore, turning husbands against wives and friend against friend.

Two weeks later, Senior Constable Kiara Lui returns to the murder scene with her girlfriend, Elise. Having interviewed the survivors, Kiara is certain at least one of them is lying and the killer is within her grasp. Kiara knows that the answers lie within the house, but with strange occurrences occurring around the property, one person still missing, and her own girlfriend’s strange behaviour starting to concern her, can Kiara break through all the lies and secrets and find the truth before the killer strikes again?

This was another excellent and thrilling read from Heath, who pulls together another insane, yet highly clever, mystery that you really cannot put down. Making full use of Heath’s outrageous plot, Kill Your Husbands is a dark and twisty novel that I had so much fun reading and which is easily one of the best pieces of Australian fiction I have read all year.

To see the full review, click on the link below:
https://unseenlibrary.com/2023/12/02/...

An abridged review of this book also ran in the Canberra Weekly on 30 November 2023:
https://unseenlibrary.com/2023/12/31/...

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I thought this sounded like fun.

Six people (three couples) go away for a weekend at a secluded house. Four of them went to school together and two others ‘married in’. There are some complications in both the couples’ relationships with each other and their relationships to the other couples. Oscar and Isla had a child five years ago and for Oscar, it has destroyed their marriage. Isla wants another baby and Oscar cannot even contemplate that. For Cole and Clementine, they’ve desperately been trying to conceive and IVF hasn’t been working for them. The cost is exhorbitant and Cole’s gym business is struggling, something that he can’t bring himself to share with Clementine, who thinks everything is fine. Cole wants to see Clementine happy. And Dom and Felicity seem perfect but one of the little group loathes Dominic. When the idea of partner swapping comes up, it’s a joke at first, an offhand remark. But then it gets more serious, a plan is made so that no one will really know who they are with and it’ll be one night only and everyone agrees, each of them mentally forming a plan for how they will get the person they want. But when the lights come back on and a body is found….the weekend takes a sinister turn. Especially as it seems like the murderer isn’t finished just yet and there’s no way of escaping the house.

I didn’t realise that this book is actually a kind of sequel or connected to another book but in reading this I definitely got the feeling that there were things it felt like I should know. I probably should’ve read Kill Your Brother first and would have, if I’d known but this isn’t linked as a series on Goodreads so I didn’t notice until I was a part of the way in and what happened to Elise kept getting referenced. Elise is a paramedic and the partner of the Detective who ends up leading this murder case and she definitely has some psychological trauma from whatever happened in that previous book.

This is a fast paced story told in a back and forth way. We start with one of the people escaping the chaos from the holiday house and the discovery by Detective Kiara Lui of more bodies and then go back and forth in time to flesh out the three couples and the events of the weekend and how it went from a fun weekend away to something that ended up with six people deciding to partner swap and multiple of those people being murdered. There’s also someone still missing for a large portion of this book and Detective Lui has to both figure out which of the survivors is the murderer and also deal with her somewhat stressful personal life, with Elise still being affected by what happened to her and clearly keeping secrets from her. For some reason, Kiara’s decision to deal with this is to take Elise on a weekend to the murder house….? I don’t want to touch on either the professional or moral queries in that but it seemed….unusual at best. Potential for disaster at worst.

I think the biggest problem I had in this was how quickly literally everyone agreed to the swapping in a location where it felt like that it was going to be impossible to keep it as secret as possible. This is sort of explained later in the book and other characters are given some motivation for agreeing in the end but it still felt a bit…unlikely to me. Making it dark and having everyone go into secret bedrooms in a game where there’s literally only six people and four of them went to school together and everyone is going to have to come out of the bedrooms doesn’t really spell keeping it quiet and if you think giving all the men an identical haircut was the answer….it very much was not. I had so many other questions, especially given the reveal of how it all played out and that made me really wonder about a lot of things.

But that aside, this was honestly a fun read. Like I said it’s fast paced, the reveals are for the most part, surprising and I definitely changed my mind twice on who the murderer was! I even considered the possibility of more than one murderer because this little group of friends have a bunch of secrets and not everything is as straightforward as these three couples just hanging out for fun. There are resentments that go back over a decade, some sneaky feelings and curiosities, a little bit of a dalliance that’s gone wrong and now well, people are dead and someone is very much trying to pin it on someone else. It gets more and more twisty the further you get into the book and I enjoyed the piecing it all together.

You can read this as a standalone like I did and figure out what is going on between Kiara and Elise but honestly it’d probably add more to the story if you’d read Kill Your Brother first and experienced the events of that first hand. But you definitely don’t have to.

I enjoyed this. Came for the title, stayed for the clever story.

7/10

Instantly hooked, this book was very hard to put down. The constant twisting and chopping and changing of who was guilty kept me on the edge of my seat. I guessed the killer simply because I had thought everyone was to blame at some point! But it came together so precisely at the end.

I haven't read Kill Your Brother, but I will be now.

This is a twisty story that had my mind going in all directions, I thought I had it worked out and then no I didn’t, what happens when six friends go away for a weekend together, four of them had gone to high school together two married into the group, the house is in the mountains, no internet, no phones a weekend of drinking bush walking and fun, lots of discussions but when partner swapping is bought up, will it happen?

The answer is yes, with rules three woman will pick a room all lights are out and then the men will enter a room, there is to be no talking no one will know who they slept with, all should be good afterwards that is until one of them turns up dead.

The five reaming realise that the phone isn’t working and the keys to the car are missing, suspicion abounds they need to leave but it appears that the killer is not finished yet, what will they do?

Enter new detective Kiara Lui and the investigation begins Kiara questions all witnesses and is not yet clear on what happened but she will not give up, two weeks later Kiara takes her partner Elise for a romantic weekend at the same house and soon Kiara is thinking this wasn’t such a good idea but she is also discovering some facts while there.

This is a fabulous story truly I changed my mind so many times on who the killer is, is it just one or more and why, why did this all happen, were there plans in place before the weekend started or did it just happen because of things that happened on the weekend?

So many questions to be answered, you need to read this one to discover the answers, Elise and Kiara were in Kill Your Brother and I loved that one as well and they are fabulous characters. This is such a well written story, with a awesome ending that I do highly recommend to any reader who loves a good mystery thriller, fabulous character, a must read.

My thanks to Allen & Unwin for my copy to read and review.

Kill Your Husbands by Jack Heath is very cleverly written because in the present the police are interviewing the survivors politely, using their title and surname, but in the past (well, very recent past... last weekend) they all use first names. So for a long time we don't know who's dead and who's not.

Weirdly it didn't occur to me until I started the book that it was a follow-up to Kill Your Brother, which I enjoyed when it was released in 2021. It's not exactly a sequel as such, rather it features two of the same characters, cop (here recently promoted to detective) Kiara Lui and her girlfriend Elise (held capture in the first book). Their relationship is on rocky ground here, well so thinks Kiara as Elise is acting strangely and keeping secrets from her.

There's an excellent combination of dark humour and irony on offer here. And I guess it's to be expected of Heath whose series featuring a cannibalistic protagonist I very much enjoy.

This offers a fascinating study of human nature. How friends once so similar, can now be so different. Or perhaps they always were? And it's a confronting reminder how fickle we can be. How easily swayed. Suddenly distrusting someone we've always trusted. And one character has convinced himself that he's madly in love with someone, and then very suddenly he's like... "Whaaa? What was I thinking?" The idea now seems ridiculous but - until recently - it also seemed so very real.

It's easy to judge such characters, but at the same time, there's a sense of familiarity, of realism because we've sometimes experienced that. That bizarre element of human nature where we become certain of something... and later can't recall how or why we were so fascinated (like me with Australian Idol in its first year, or Sylvester Stallone in Rocky III. It's like being woken from a trance and wondering.... "WTF?")

It'd also be easy to dismiss a lot of these characters as unlikeable. And, in all honesty it IS tempting. There are probably a couple we get to know less than the others, though we switch narrators throughout. The weekend away has come at a pivotal time for several of the cast and there's a lot going on with each individual and couple.

I read this in an unplanned sitting. Heath's sense of humour is on show in spades, including in the way bodies are found. The pacing is great and Heath is able to imbue that real sense of expectation - what will happen next? Is this about good and evil? Bad luck and misfortune? Or a combination of both. Possibly also a reminder about the importance of honesty in a relationship. And that lesson is relevant for ALL of the characters here. 

I'm enjoying this series. I didn't feel as I had as good a connection with Elise in this outing but perhaps that's because she IS hiding something from Kiara and holding back. I wonder what will be next... Kill Your Sisters? Maybe Kill Your Colleagues! (Ahem.....)

4.5 stars

Set in and near the fictional central New South Wales of Warrigal, Senior Constable Kiara Lui is once again on the job, hoping to solve her first murder case as lead investigator. It’s only been a year since the events chronicled in Kill Your Brother and she is still in the process of helping her girlfriend Elise to deal with the trauma suffered back then. Jack Heath has provided us with an entertaining murder mystery and has managed to put Kiara and Elise through another relationship testing scenario.

The prospect of a weekend away proves too good an opportunity to pass up for three couples, friends from high school who are now hitting their mid-thirties and looking for some direction in their respective lives. But the weekend doesn’t go as planned and Kill Your Husbands becomes quite the black comedy thriller complete with unexpected twists.

When the police show up, days after the fateful weekend, two men are dead, a husband and wife have locked themselves in a bedroom, one woman is a traumatised mess and another woman has gone missing. Something has gone seriously wrong in this isolated holiday house and we’re about to spend the rest of the book recounting the events leading up to the fateful night, not to mention the aftermath.

Isla and Oscar, Clementine and Cole and Felicity and Dom are together in a difficult to reach house, high in the mountains and out of mobile phone range. There’s clearly some underlying tensions going on between some in the party, but nothing could prepare them for the results of a seemingly innocent game of Truth or Dare.

Flicking timelines between the night of the incident and a week later when the police investigation, led by Senior Constable Kiara Lui, tries to unravel what the heck went on. This becomes a perplexing case. We know there are at least 2 dead among the six but exactly who died and how remains unclear for a significant portion of the book. We’re left to try to unravel the frayed strings along with Lui which turns out to be far from a straightforward task.

Just as important, and just as significant as the murder investigation is the personal relationship between Kiara and Elise. Kiara’s decision to organise a holiday stay in the murder house with Elise as her guest is a questionable move, but one that certainly adds a further level of intrigue and tension to the story. Putting Elise this close to a murder case so soon after the trauma she’d recently been through was definitely stretching the friendship.

The success of Kill Your Husbands lies around the complexity of each of the characters involved and their underlying flaws and frailties. Jack Heath does an outstanding job of initially painting each of his main characters as shallow and carefree, up for a good time and ready to party. But by digging deeper and deeper into their psyches we begin to understand there are more sinister realities at play and some may be carrying some kind of ulterior motive with resentment lurking close to the surface of more than one friend.

The diverse cast of characters means that there’s ample opportunity to create doubt over who the murderer may be. Heath has also chucked in a slew of twists and unexpected turns to ensure that we’re navigating the waters of a rewarding domestic thriller.

The events from the earlier book are merely hinted at to create a frame of reference, so you’re going to be able to enjoy this as a stand alone thriller.

My thanks to Allen & Unwin via NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC of the book which allowed me to read, enjoy and review what turned out to be a very enjoyable story.

Three couples head up to a house in the mountains for some R&R. When the topic of partner swapping comes up, everyone seems on board. It is agreed that everything will be done in the dark, so no one knows who they were with and therefore avoiding any awkwardness. But when the lights are back on,one of them is dead.

Whoa baby, this was a WILD ride! Yes, there were a fair few characters to keep track of but once I got to know who is who, the story just flowed. This book was fast paced with short chapters, multiple POV's and dual timelines (then and now). I was meant to read it to a buddy read schedule but found it so difficult to stop at certain parts - it was just so bingeable! I loved trying to figure out the whodunnit on my own and I thought I had it......but then found out I was wrong! A brilliant page turner. If locked room thrillers are your jam, you'll love this one. All the stars from me.

Over the years I’ve read quite a bit of Heath’s work, enjoying it to varying degrees. Some was a bit under developed, and other novels just failed to strike the right chord with me. “Kill Your Husbands”, however, was particularly enjoyable. It’s a twisty murder mystery with a solid dose of humanity.

The story is told in two strands. In one, we follow the police investigation into a weekend which left two people dead, one missing, and three in hospital for various lengths of time. In the other, we flash back to the start of the weekend, and follow the couples from there.

The group of friends feel very realistic, with tensions and resentments sitting alongside affection and long habit. Are they still friends from habit, or do they genuinely like each other? What of the interloper spouses who didn’t go to high school with most of the group? How have the pressures of life – including infertility, financial challenges, fading careers, failing businesses, and difficult children – affected their relationships?

Similarly, the police investigation feels very real, with capable officers hampered by those less competent and distracted by personal challenges. I suspect this novel may be a sequel, given some aspects of the primary investigator’s personal life. However, it was easy to follow and highly readable. If it is a sequel, or one in a series, it didn’t impact on my enjoyment.

It’s a fast moving novel, tightly plotted and believable enough. The characters are vivid and individually believable. Each feels real and their interactions with others and the group as a whole are very credible.

Heath blurs what’s going on in subtle ways. For example, the police investigation refers to members of the three couples by surname only, while the flashbacks use first names only. This fairly subtle approach makes it harder for the reader to know what’s going on. It also makes the flashbacks even more compelling.

This a well written and enjoyable murder mystery. It doesn’t dwell on gore, and relationships are central to the plot. Readers will feel satisfied when all is revealed – the plot hangs together well. In other words, this novel ticks all the genre boxes necessary, and provides an entertaining read at the same time.

I will return to add links once this is posted to my blog

Australian crime and thriller author Jack Health loves a good puzzle. The main character of his Timothy Blake series is not only a cannibal but also solves riddles. And his new series revels in twists, double twists and long gestating set ups. The first book in this series, Kill Your Brother, introduced Elise and her detective partner Kiara. The follow up, Kill Your Husbands, can easily be read as a stand alone. The first book provides some context for Elise and Kiara’s relationship and in particular the current tensions in it and Warrigal, the rural setting in which they live. Otherwise, this too can be read as a standalone mystery thriller.
Kill Your Husbands opens with a woman fleeing the scene of a murder and two other characters being discovered in a stand off around a knife. The three were part of a group of six, three couples, who rented an out of the way house (no phone or internet) for a weekend getaway. Now two of the men are dead and one of the women is missing. Kiara is brought in to investigate and decides to take Elise on a weekend away to the house where the murders happened as a way of helping repair their relationship which appears to be faltering. Suffice to say things do not go as planned. In around this story is the backstory of the three couples, told from various points of view in the lead up to and through the mayhem of their weekend away.
Kill Your Husbands is a pure puzzlebox mystery. Heath maintains some of the tension by a bit of a contrivance of having the characters refer to the three couples by their surnames only in the present sections and refer to each other by first names in the flashbacks, so readers are never quite sure who is who. Those flashbacks show three rocky relationships and a bizarre agreement to partner swap, and agreement which not only results in tragedy but muddies the waters as to who is responsible for what. Suffice to say that Heath leads readers through a range of suspects as he unravels the mystery. And as with Kill Your Brother, no detail, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, goes to waste.
Kill Your Husbands is fun but relies on a few too many contrivances and questionable character motives and beats. As with Kill Your Brother, though, that probably won’t matter to most readers as they whip through the pages. Because one thing Heath knows how to do well is keep readers hooked, get them to commit to what they think the answer is going to be and then pull the rug out from under them and start all over again.

Jack Heath just keeps on getting better and better - and Kill Your Husbands is no different. I'm in awe at just how great this guy is. Can't wait for the next one.

I hadn’t read Kill Your Brother which was the previous book to this one, but I felt I haven’t missed anything apart from perhaps a bit of background to the detective and her backstory with her coworkers and partner.

Three couples, all but one, old school friends, get away for a weekend to an isolated house in the Australian bush with no mobile reception. Within 24 hours two are dead, one is missing, and the remaining three have conflicting stories.
Told in alternate now and then chapters and from different perspectives, I thoroughly enjoyed this fast paced mystery.

Despite feeling there are some hints in this book that give away a bit of the first book, I will definitely still read that now as I loved the twists and turns and writing style.
Highly recommended.

Kill Your Husbands is a novel by Australian author Jack Heath that follows on from his previous novel, Kill Your Brother, featuring several of the same characters and set in the same rural NSW town of Warrigal. Real estate agent Oscar is happy enough to go along on a weekend in an isolated mountain cottage with two other couples, his wife Isla’s school friends, mostly because he has certain expectations about another of the guests.

There are some close friendships within the couples, a financial planner, a stand-up comedian, a gym owner and a fitness model and, while things aren’t exactly as expected on arrival, they rub along fairly well despite different temperaments, even (eventually) agreeing to partake in a risqué plan. Does that go well? As one of their number is found dead in the hot tub afterwards, clearly not.

When an obviously traumatised wife manages to make her way down the mountain on foot, raving about a murderer on the loose, Detective Sergeant Kiara Lui has charge of her first case. She is able to temper the response of the enthusiastic armed response team enough to recover a very frightened couple from the house, discovering two dead husbands, and learning that one of the wives is missing. And each survivor is telling a different story.

Frustrated by the lack of insight produced by witness interviews, and the delay in results of the DNA collected by Warrigal’s inept crime scene technician, Kiara decides to take her girlfriend, Elise, who desperately needs a break, for a weekend up to the (thoroughly-cleaned) murder house, where she might get a better feel of just what happened. But are they safe in this isolated spot with no mobile phone coverage and one of the party still missing?

Heath uses multiple narrators to tell a tale that is cleverly plotted, with twists that might require pre-booking a chiropractic appointment, well-disguised clues and red herrings to keep the even the most astute reader guessing right up to the exciting climax. The reader will wonder about the reliability of some of that narrative, but even as the story ventures into very dark territory, there is some (quite black) humour to relieve the tension.

Heath’s characters are believable for all their flaws and failings, and he captures the feel of the NSW country town with consummate ease. There are some spoilers for the earlier book, so reading Kill Your Brother first is advised. Readers of his Timothy Blake series know they will be in for a wild ride, and the best advice is to just go with the flow for an action-packed and very entertaining dose of Aussie intrigue.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided NetGalley and Allen & Unwin