"The Killer's Wife" by Bill Floyd; Minotaur/St. Martin's Press ($23.95)

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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.