The best books about love triangles that turn deadly

Beware the replacement wife! Those folks we envy because they appear to have it all (flawless family/home/career, etc…) are often frantically treading water, desperate to keep that facade of perfection afloat. I know because I’ve been there, in a seemingly idyllic marriage where underneath the trappings of material success was, well, crap.

In this novel, the second wife thinks she’s got it goin’ on with the first wife’s ex, but things are not as they seem (are they ever in domestic thrillers, or real life??) I got a vicarious kick out of the two wives’ scheming and revenge-lust, and the dry humor laced throughout the story had me snickering with snarky delight!

In 1906, a handsome scoundrel named Chester Gillette murdered his girlfriend, Grace Brown, by rowing her out onto a secluded mountain lake, whacking her with a tennis racket and pushing her overboard.

Why? Grace was a lowly factory girl, and her inconvenient pregnancy threatened to rain on Chester’s skirt-chasing parade. I was sucked into this poignant tale, having camped and canoed in upstate New York where the crime took place. I even teared up as I imagined what it felt like for poor Grace, cast to the bottom of a lake by the young man she thought was going to marry her.

This carefully researched non-fiction account is an irresistible combination of detective story and romantic drama.

This one had my head spinning right round, baby! Happy marriage, babies, a nice home—what more could a young wife ask for?

How about someone she can trust, for starters, and how ’bout her husband’s ex-lover quits coming around all the time, tattling tales of his murky past? It reminded me of an old friend of mine who fell in love with a guy she’d met through an online dating site. He claimed he was long divorced, but—whoops—was actually still married, and living with his estranged wife in separate parts of their house.

You can probably guess how that ended, but not this book. With every wild plot turn, I was grabbing for the Oh sh*t handle and gasping for breath.

Picture it: you’re a woman married to a man whose first wife went missing, presumed dead. Then: knock, knock, who’s there? It’s the missing wife.

I loved the freaky premise, the mystery, and the scheming among the members of this shockingly unexpected and awkward ménage à trois. I can relate to Merritt, the caring second wife who feels a moral obligation to help the now-unmissing Lydia. I’d want to help too, and like Merritt, I’d probably feel guilty for enjoying a dreamy new life with another woman’s husband.

I enjoyed pondering the thorny legalities of the situation, but as the parties involved dig deeper into the circumstances of Lydia’s disappearance, it turns out that who’s legally married to whom is the least of their worries.

Is it really a love triangle when one of the people is dead?

The unnamed English girl in this classic novel is up against it from the get-go because she thinks her new husband, Maxim, is still in love with his previous wife, the beautiful, sophisticated Rebecca, who drowned in a sailing accident.

The marriage is a bit crowded, seeing as there are three people in it. It’s a tough position to be in when you can’t confront the other woman because she’s now at the bottom of the bay (or, as in a case that I have an unfortunate but intimate familiarity with, she lives in another state).

I was rooting for the girl the whole time, praying she’d grow a backbone and stand up to the ghost of Rebecca.