"A Reliable Wife" written by Robert Goolrick

If you like Gothic novels, you will love this book! There is no mistaking this dark story for what it is, right from the opening page. The bleak, frozen landscape of winter in a small Wisconsin town, where inexplicable madness is rampant among the townspeople, sets the tone for a classic Gothic novel. Living in his castle-like estate, Ralph Truitt our tragic protagonist, places an ad in a Chicago newspaper for a "...reliable wife. Compelled by practical, not romantic reasons..." which is precisely what he gets (albeit not in the way he intended!). Catherine Land, a not so virtuous woman with a sordid past answers the ad and becomes Truitt's bride. Add to that mix, Truitt's relentless search for his estranged ne'er-do-well son Antonio, (from his first marriage) and an intricate plot peppered with plenty of Gothic twists and turns, including Catherine's plan to slowly poison her new husband, unravels.

A Reliable Wife is definitely a page-turner and will provide enough fodder for a solid book group discussion, and is a great example of the Gothic novel. I personally found myself growing weary of the sense of fatalism that typically defines the Gothic genre. The fatalistic tone is exemplified in this passage "Catherine Land.........set out to poison - slowly, with arsenic - the husband who loved her, whom she herself loved, to her surprise, the man who had saved her from a life of destruction and despair. Such things happened".

All in all, if you are interested in a chilling, dark, Gothic page-turner, go ahead and give A Reliable Wife a try!