Meet Amber. She Married Money and a Monster

The Climb

Amber Patterson is broke, bitter, and done being invisible. She’s the kind of woman who studies wealthy people the way other people study for exams, and when she spots Daphne Parrish, a beautiful philanthropist married to a gorgeous rich husband, at a charity event, Amber doesn’t see a stranger. She sees a blueprint. What follows is Amber engineering her way into Daphne’s life with the single-mindedness of a heist planner, befriending her, becoming indispensable to her, and slowly, patiently, aiming herself at Jackson Parrish like he’s a job she’s interviewing for.

Here’s the thing though: for a huge stretch of this book, Amber is the only person we’re allowed to root for or against, and Constantine (the pen name of two sisters writing together, which I did not know on my first read and found delightful once I did) makes her almost too competent. She thinks five steps ahead. She manufactures a miscarriage for sympathy. She engineers Daphne’s disgrace piece by piece. It’s compelling in the way watching someone cheat at solitaire is compelling. You know it’s wrong, you keep watching anyway.

Why I Almost Gave Up, and Why I’m Glad I Didn’t

I’ll be straight with you: the first half is a slog if you’re impatient, and I was impatient. I picked this up on a flight to visit my sister, the kind of trip where you want a book that grabs you by the collar in chapter one, and instead I got a woman meticulously cataloging another woman’s yoga schedule for what felt like ages. Amber’s voice is cold and calculating by design, which is a real accomplishment of craft, but it also means you’re spending three hundred pages with someone who has all the warmth of a spreadsheet. I put it down twice. I almost didn’t pick it back up the second time.

Then Part Two happens.

I’m not going to spoil what shifts, because the shift is the entire reason this book became a word-of-mouth phenomenon among people who don’t normally read thrillers, but I will say this: Constantine does something structurally ballsy by handing the narrative to someone else entirely, and everything you thought you understood about Jackson, about Daphne, about who’s the predator and who’s the prey, gets rearranged. It’s the kind of twist that makes you want to flip back to page one and reread the whole thing with new eyes, which I actually did, sitting on my sister’s couch at eleven at night while she asked if I was okay because I kept making noises.

What genuinely doesn’t work: Jackson himself stays frustratingly thin for a character this pivotal, more a collection of red flags than a person, and the prose throughout is workmanlike at best. Nobody’s rereading a sentence here for the music of it. This is not a beautifully written book. It is a well-engineered one, and those are different compliments.

My one tangent: I kept thinking about how this book landed in 2017, right in that stretch after Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train had trained an entire generation of readers to expect an unreliable narrator and a rug-pull, and how Constantine seemed to know exactly what that audience wanted and built a machine to deliver it. That’s not an insult. That’s craft. But it does mean if you’ve read a lot of domestic thrillers, you’ll clock some of the mechanics.

Am I overrating this because the ending worked on me so completely that it retroactively colored the slow parts gold? Maybe. I’ve gone back and forth on whether the back half earns forgiveness for the front half, and I think it does, barely, but I understand completely why some readers close this book at the sixty percent mark and never look back.

Amber doesn’t want to be loved. She wants to be paid what she thinks the world owes her, and she’s willing to become anyone to collect.

About Liv Constantine

Liv Constantine isn’t one person, it’s two: sisters Lynne Constantine and Valerie Constantine, who write together under a shared pen name, which somehow makes the book’s obsession with performed identity even funnier in retrospect. They grew up between Greece and the American South, which feels like exactly the kind of detail that explains a book this interested in people who don’t quite belong in the rooms they’ve talked their way into. Since The Last Mrs. Parrish they’ve built out something of a Parrish universe and kept writing twisty domestic suspense, but this one remains the calling card, the book that made readers pass it hand to hand at book clubs saying “just get through the first half.”

If this got its hooks in you, read these next

• The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, for the same trick of making you completely reevaluate a marriage you thought you understood
• My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing, if you want the predator’s voice from the very first page instead of earning it later
• You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, for a slower, more literary take on not seeing what’s right in front of you
• The Second Mrs. Astor if you want the “replacing a wife” premise played straight and historical instead of scheming and modern

You can grab a copy here: The Last Mrs. Parrish on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Amber spends the whole first half being genuinely resourceful and hardworking in service of something monstrous. Did that make you sympathize with her at all, or just admire the technique?
2. How did the shift in perspective in Part Two change your read on Daphne? Did you feel manipulated by the author, or impressed?
3. Jackson is thinly drawn compared to the two women. Do you think that’s a flaw, or does it serve the story that he’s more of a prize than a person?
4. What does the book seem to be saying about beauty, money, and who gets to be believed?
5. Would you have kept reading past the halfway point without knowing a twist was coming, or did you need someone to tell you to push through?