Sucks you right in from the beginning, which I appreciate when I begin a book.. Thoroughly enjoyed this book in two days!

3.5 stars rounded up ⭐️

‘𝙄’𝙫𝙚 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙙 𝙞𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙚, 𝙮𝙚𝙩 𝙞𝙩 𝙤𝙘𝙘𝙪𝙧𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙟𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙨𝙢𝙤𝙠𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙢𝙞𝙧𝙧𝙤𝙧𝙨. 𝙎𝙤 𝙛𝙧𝙖𝙜𝙞𝙡𝙚, 𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙫𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙨𝙝 𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙢𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩. 𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙮𝙤𝙪’𝙧𝙚 𝙡𝙚𝙛𝙩 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙙𝙖𝙧𝙠, 𝙚𝙢𝙥𝙩𝙮 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙙𝙤𝙪𝙗𝙩.’

The story told over the view points of the 3 characters was really interesting. I think with the totally different personalities and lifestyles, it made you need more each chapter. I was really interested to work out more about each woman and the situation that was unfolding. The pacing was good and it flowed really well - making it a really smooth read.

That being said, I wouldn’t call this book a thriller - it’s more of a domestic suspense drama in my opinion. Even though it wasn’t what I’d gone in hoping for, it didn’t distract my enjoyment of the book at all. The characters weren’t particularly likeable but I found this worked better for the narrative and even though you weren’t really rooting for them - you needed to know what they were thinking and what they were going to do next.

The twists that came towards the end, I definitely wasn’t expecting. They suited the storyline well, but I’m not entirely sure how I felt about them. The final chapter/epilogue in particular left me feeling a little unsure about it all. But again, everything was very cleverly done and worked brilliantly.

For a heavy and twisted, domestic suspense read - this is the book for you. Please do check the TW’s beforehand though as there are some very raw aspects to it.

~

Thank you to @netgalley @cateraywriter and @septemberpublishing for this ARC ❤️

~

#GoodHusbands #NetGalley #ARCReview #CateRay #DomesticSuspense

The description really drew me into this one. Unfortunately, it was a let down. I was hoping for the promised thriller but received more of a dramatic Lifetime movie. The writing is good but it’s a slow burn and anti-climatic.

You think you know everything about your husband, or do you?


Thanks to Netgalley and BooksGoSocial for the eARC for my honest review.

This book I would describe as a domestic drama, not really a thriller. However, it kept my hooked and wanting to find out what would happen next.

Please please be aware that the book is about rape so if this is a trigger for you then please be aware of this. It is a very heavy book but very realistic in how different parts are discussed between the characters.

It was a book that left me wanting to know more at the end.

The blurb of this book really appealed to me and when I was arranging the blogtour on behalf of Random Things Tours I couldn’t resist popping myself down for a spot.

Three women, complete strangers, all in different stages of their lives, married and seemingly happy receive a letter on the same day, accusing their husbands of rape over twenty years ago. These three women have to face up to some horrifying truths and look very closely at their husbands and their lives right now and ask themselves are they willing to give up everything they have for the justice of a young woman they don’t know?

How well do you really know your husband? Should his past remain in his past? Can you live with yourself knowing he may have been involved in a violent sexual attack in his youth? Who are the other men accused of this crime? These are only some of the questions Jessica, Stephanie and Priyanka are facing and once the women meet up, their lives are now entangled and nothing will ever be the same again.

Initially I thought this would be more of a thriller, however it veers towards dark domestic drama and some of the scenes are harrowing and upsetting to read, so please be aware that the main subject matter centres around a young girls rape and the consequences on those around her.

Overall, although an uncomfortable read, I did enjoy (not the right word) following Jessica, Stephanie and Priyanka’s journey and seeing how each women dealt with their emotions and feelings throughout the story. My only issue was the ending which I didn’t fully understand and felt it detracted from the important issues of the story.

Good Husbands by Cate Ray follows three women, strangers to each other, who receive letters informing them that their husbands assaulted a woman twenty years ago together. Each woman, Jess, Priyanka, and Stephanie, were their own unique and separate characters. I think it’s easy for an author to give characters different interests, but it’s harder for them to give different motivations. Ray did a wonderful job at this.

I’m rating this book five stars. It was a page turner, had strong character arcs, and was SUCH and interesting premise. There’s a few moments (one in particular in Jess’ POV) where I was like, sure, okay girl. I would’ve liked Jess to have started at a slightly different point and get even further in her development, rather than speed run learning about r*pe and then “suddenly understanding the big picture.”

Wonderful development of class disparity.

My favorite part was Stephanie’s end. That’s exactly how I like those sorts of things to happen, action leading and to the point. Let the reader realize the act as the character is. So well done!

Thank you Cate Ray for sharing your work with us.

Three women, Jessica Jackson, Stephanie Brooke and Priyanka Lawley, strangers to each other, get an identical letter from a woman called Holly Waite, who tells them that her mother, Nicola Waite, was raped 30 years ago in 1990 by their husbands, Maximilian Jackson, Daniel Brooke and Andrew Lawley. For all of them, in marriages of love and trust, the allegation in the letter is deeply disturbing.

The letter evokes different reactions. Jess wants the truth. Priyanka is at first determined to protect Andrew, then loses confidence in him and is undecided about what to do. Stephanie wants to protect her husband and save her family, no matter what. While the other two would prefer to hide from the truth, Jess eggs them on, seeking to band together as a team.

Jess makes it her goal to get justice for Nicole, and Holly too, knowing that the truth could upset their lives and break up their marriages and families.

But will they ever get at the truth, and will justice be served?


The novel is written in the first person present tense PoV of Jess, Priyanka and Stephanie. The book is written in three parts, The Letter, The Diary and The Key, each of which drive the action onward.

The premise is a weighty one. A strong woman in a committed marriage learns that her husband has raped somebody in the past. How would she react?

I liked the writing. Here’s a sample:

It’s so temperamental, sexual interplay. One word, one look can alter things dramatically… Attraction is just smoke and mirrors. So fragile, desire can vanish at any moment.

Bitter looks ugly when unwrapped.

At 400 pages, the book is long, with not much action filling up those pages, but although I found myself impatient, I wasn’t bored. The author raises the point about the steady breakdown of democracy in many countries, including India.

The novel meanders a lot, going into questions of male privilege, testosterone, even marital sex, whether a wife can say No, and the age-old assumption that when a woman is raped or sexually assaulted, she was ‘asking’ for it. How the blame is shifted on to the girl, while the perpetrator is condoned.

There is an extensive section about the gaslighting that women are subjected to. And above all, the institution where the heinous act was committed, Montague Club, where women weren’t even allowed in until the 80s.

I found Priyanka’s job very interesting. Although ungraded, we need more discussions on such subjects for young people and teenagers.

I was happy to see an Indian character, ticking off the diversity quotient. I was happier still to know she wasn’t a stereotype. The only mistake was the author’s acknowledgement of her Punjabi Indian heritage. Bandyopadhyay, Priyanka’s surname, is Bengali, not Punjabi.

Stephanie was the character I warmed the least to. She was the most unwilling to believe in the veracity of Nicole’s story, believing the lies about the woman’s promiscuity and how she asked for it. But I also felt sorry for her once she revealed that she learned to keep my sentences short because he often interrupts me when I’m speaking, doesn’t ask what it was that I was going to say.

Priyanka changes her stance when she is confronted by all the lessons around consent that she teaches her students.

Jess is the driving force, for the greater part of the book, the only one to believe Nicole. Of the three women, she has the most powerful and unwavering moral compass. Between them, the three women spanned the gamut of reactions to rape.

Even the men are each representative of a type. There is the ‘weak’ Mr Nice Guy, the brash, militant type and the one who gets by on his looks.

Each of the characters went through turmoil in their respective lives, and they all underwent change.

This was a book about strong women, every single one of them, major and minor characters alike. I also liked how every single thread was resolved, and every character given closure, down to Shelley Fricker. In the end, this band of women stood up for their own against the power imbalance.

This book was seriously well written, and I enjoyed getting to know the characters. However its not at all suspensful or thrilling. Its definitley a drama. The ending has a little but of momentum but don't read it expecting a typical thriller.

“I let it go, for all the many reasons that we let a lot of things go as women. You can’t fight everything, everyone. You pick your battles because it’s a long life.”

Jess, Priyanka, and Stephanie receive a letter accusing their husbands of raping a woman thirty years ago from the woman's daughter, Holly Waite, who is on her deathbed. She leaves behind her storage unit for them to discover the truth of their husbands.

Good Husbands is marketed as a mystery thriller, but it is rather a contemporary fiction uncovering the layers around sexual assault. The characters were well-developed, representing three sides of the 'sexual assault' argument. Jess believes the victim, Nicola Waite, and does not accuse her of being responsible for the situation, while Stephanie immediately thinks Nicola must have brought this on herself. Priyanka is on the neutral ground with her opinions, wanting to implicate neither her husband nor the girl. The three wives form a team. While it is a bumpy journey to come to an agreement, they manage it somehow.

The transformation of Stephanie was the best. She went through a change of perspective through Rosie and Jess. Priyanka learned to take charge of her life and stop being so neutral. Jess helped the girl. The relationship between Stephanie and Dan was the highlight of the story for me, and the ending fascinated me. I was happy to see Stephanie finally getting the guts to do the right thing.

Cate Ray explores the three husbands, who have secret lives outside their house, who are not as good as they had assumed them to be. It questions marriage, relationships, the role of women, and the consequences of divorce as well. This is not a story for everyone. If you can handle reading about distressing opinions and facts on sexual assault, and how most people are quick to blame the victim, this book is for you.

Thanks to NetGalley and Park Row for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My review appears on an Art District Radio podcast - Dark Mysteries. Link below.
What would you do if you received a letter accusing your husband of rape?
Moral dilemmas, solidarity and trust

This book was ok. I mostly blame false advertisement and I expected a thriller but ended up getting more of a drama without any suspense or mystery. If I knew what I was getting into I probably would have enjoyed it more.

This book really does challenge perceptions of how we see certain types of assault. How a lack of aggression is deemed as not as clear cut, or ‘straight forward’ rape. When 3 wives receive a letter from the daughter of a victim of rape, claiming that all 3 of their husbands were involved, they have to decide how to respond. Do they confront their husbands? Investigate behind their backs? Or brush it under the carpets to maintain status quo, after all, it was so long ago…

Does ‘historical rape’ when times were different and lines of acceptability were not as clear cut, somehow make it less intentionally horrific? How blurred are the lines in reality, or is reality catching up with archaic morality? This book sends you on a journey with characters distorting right and wrong for their own survival. But ultimately, we have to be able to live with our decisions. Does one bad decision, a monster make?

Good books get you questioning yourself and what you would do in a similar situation. This is a fantastic book.

A very thought provoking story of three women who find themselves linked by a guilty secret in their husbands' past. But what is the truth and what should they do about it? A gripping ride but some unanswered questions.

An interesting and enjoyable read that makes the reader consider what they would do in the same situation. Thanks for the opportunity to read

Ray did a wonderful job creating the premise of this book, as they explored the all too relevant topic of finding out something unsavory about your spouse’s past. The differing character perspectives demonstrates the various emotions and reactions that one may have, anxiety, denial, disgust, and unease, to name a few. With that though, I really struggled to initially connect with the characters, as I felt that their initial introductions and reactions are almost too similar to differentiate. Overall, Ray has created a difficult, yet necessary, story that I would recommend to all.

Read this in a couple of sittings - was compelling and intriguing and a story unlike I’ve read before. I could see this translating to screen and being a great television series as well.

You would think, that for a book to be classified as a “mystery & thriller,” it’d have to 1) have a mystery, and 2) be thrilling. #GoodHusbands manages to fulfil neither.

Book descriptions need to stop taking Buzzfeed as a role model. Using click-bait hooks to lure in readers will never end nicely. Here, the click-bait wasn’t the plot, but the genre . . . which, arguably, will infuriate the reader more. I wanted to read a thriller, not something else. Even if the book turned out to be a literary masterpiece (which it absolutely is not, and we’ll get to that horror show shortly) I would still be angry.

First of all, there is no mystery. A girl was raped several decades ago, and her rapists are now family men. Their wives each get a letter, written by the victim’s daughter - allegedly - from one of her rapists.

Now, the blurb doesn’t specify this but the women do not know each other. At all. For almost the first 20% of the book. I mention this, because I thought they’d be friends, and it’d be sort of like an adult PLL where they have to find out secrets they’re worried will get out and ruin their lives. Maybe I projected too many expectations onto this book, but it could have at least attained *one* by being a mystery, or at least thrilling.

Instead, there’s no mystery and it’s boring. Absolutely nothing happens in the entire book, except for just one thing, but by then you’re too bored to even register something finally did happen.

Maybe, you might think, there could still be a mystery — we might not know what each of these women are doing and planning. Ha! No! Because we get PoV chapters from all of them. There’s nothing left to mystery.

Let’s quickly introduce our main characters: Jess thinks being an ordinary person is a strength somehow, she’s giving NPC energy and nothing else. Priyanka has to spell Anaïs as A-na-ees to be able to remember it (even though Anais is easier to write and remember) because she remembers names better when they’re spelled phonetically . . . except Anaïs is literally spelled phonetically, and A-na-ees is the exact opposite of that — makes you wish the author or the editor had bothered to learn what phonetic spelling is. Finally, there is Stephanie, whose entire personality is being a wannabe Grace Kelly except she lacks all the grace.

If the chapters didn’t explicitly say which character’s PoV it is, or specific family members weren’t mentioned, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish among the three protagonists. I implore writers to stop using 1st person narration if they can’t build an actual voice for the character(s), the entire thing flops if it reads like the same, impersonal 3rd person narration.

But this still isn’t the cardinal sin of the writing; it’s that it gives Wattpad. And I’m not joking, the only thing missing is that the characters fail to mention they have “green orbs”. Here are some gems:
- Jess mentions she’s “originally from the East End, London.” Because that’s what people think to themselves.
- Jess mentions she’s “lived here [Bath] for 20 years.” Because people outside of Wattpad fanfics absolutely think that to themselves.
- Jess says “Eva recently turned 15 and was gifted very long legs.” Because that’s an absolutely normal train of thought. You’d also absolutely think about your own child’s long legs enough to mention them to yourself, sure, it’s not creepy or anything.
- Priyanka says she has “neon laces in [her] Doc Martens.” Because normal people remark what they’re wearing to themselves, sure. If you think this is the last time Priyanka mentions her Doc Martens and not just her ‘boots’ as normal people do, you’d be mistaken. Was this book sponsored by Doc Martens? Are they paying for product placement? Who’d think about their own clothing items through their brand names?? But more importantly… who’d actively think about what they’re wearing? This is why I stand by my Wattpad fanfic comparison. Believing that what someone’s wearing must be mentioned when it serves no purpose is extremely juvenile.

There are many more such gems where they came from, which is to say: don’t read this book unless your nerves can handle that. Mine can’t. These quotes are from the first two chapters, so they pretty much ruined the book at the very beginning.

A book should, at the bare minimum, have a good plot or a good narration. I couldn’t rely on either to make the book at least somewhat-sufferable. I wish we could preview a few pages before deciding if we want to read the book or not, would’ve saved me the stress of pushing myself through this one.

TLDR: This book is neither a mystery nor thrilling in the slightest bit. The characters don’t have distinct voices, and that’s not even the biggest problem with the writing. If you still want to read, please keep in mind rape, death, and substance abuse are mentioned.

DRC provided by #NetGalley and September Publishing.

This book was ok for me, the pace kept me turning pages at a good rate and I felt like the author describes the characters in a very relatable way. I enjoyed getting to know each of them and following this mystery that they were trying to work out together. I’m rating this at 4 stars because I kept wanting to know more and there were a few things I didn’t see coming at the end.

This Author can do no wrong. I read this over 2 days and am still thinking about it. Just read it. You're going to love it!

Thank you for the opportunity to read this Netgalley ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This 'thriller' had an interesting conceit, and was engaging enough to keep me going until the end. Unfortunately, I didn't feel that the pay off was ultimately there- not much really happens between the first and last few chapters!