"The
Killer's Wife" by Bill Floyd; Minotaur/St.
Martin's Press ($23.95)
___
Bill
Floyd's debut "The Killer's Wife" has been
creating a persistent buzz based solely on its
premise: how could a woman married to a serial killer
not know what he was doing.
It
certainly is a high-concept approach and grounded in
reality when the identity of a Kansas serial killer
revealed a wife and children a couple of years ago
instead of the usual profile of a quiet, loner who
kept to himself.
In
Floyd's fictional version, Leigh Wren never knew her
husband, Randy, had murdered a dozen people over a
decade. When she grew suspicious of his actions and
uncovered evidence of his evil, she immediately called
the police. She quickly divorced him, changed her name
and moved away with their then 6-month-old son.
Seven
years later, she's rebuilt her life in a North
Carolina suburb, content to watch her bright son have
a happy childhood. She's vowed her son will never know
the identity of his father who is now on death row -
until one night she is accosted by the father of one
of her husband's victims. The wealthy father wants her
life to be ruined as he exposes her to the media and
her neighbors. The father never believed she was
unaware of her husband's brutality. When Leigh's
identity is revealed, another serial killer who seems
to copying her husband also surfaces.
"The
Killer's Wife" has an intriguing premise and for
the first 50 or so pages Floyd elevates the plot with
insights about survivor's guilt and a thoughtful look
at a woman who never really knew the man she loved and
lived with. But "The Killer's Wife" soon
slides into a pedestrian story that succumbs to
predictability. Floyd never breaks down that wall to
make the reader believe this is a story about real
people, not characters in a novel.