Who Said Anything about Fair? Book Review of The Perfect Divorce

 

The Perfect Divorce by Jeneva Rose

Gratitude

Thank you to Blackstone Publishing and Goodreads Giveaways for the review copy of The Perfect Divorce by Jeneva Rose, available April 15, 2025.

Description

Bob messed up. He cheated on his wife, Sarah. It was a drunken one-night stand with a woman he had no interest in ever seeing again, but somehow Sarah found out--and she is not one for forgive and forget. After all, Bob knows what happened to her first husband when he cheated. When the woman he slept with goes missing, all fingers are pointed at Bob--except his own. He believes that somehow Sarah is behind this, and if he does not figure out how and save his skin, he will indeed end up like Sarah’s first husband--framed for a crime he didn’t commit.

Meanwhile, new evidence appears in Sarah’s first husband’s case, and suddenly Bob, Sarah, and the current sheriff are all swept into the whirlpool of drama.

The Perfect Divorce is told primarily from three points of view: Bob, Sarah, and the sheriff working both the missing person and the reopened case, Sheriff Hudson.

The plot is pretty juicy from the beginning—it starts off with a transcript from a documentary about Sarah’s former husband, who was tried, convicted, and put to death for the murder of his mistress. Sarah defended him, and by all accounts gave a great performance. The first scene is Bob groveling to get back with Sarah after his infidelity and her giving a hard pass.

For Sheriff Hudson, he has taken the former sheriff in to dry out one too many times--now he has killed a woman while drunk driving. Sheriff Hudson knows that he made a grave error, and that is just the beginning.

There are a lot of surprises in The Perfect Divorce, and Rose’s Sarah Morgan is quite the character. She is cold, calculated, and sure of herself. She suffers no fools, and no betrayals. For her, her primary objective is to care for her daughter, her second to lead her foundation, and finally, to divorce Bob quickly and brutally in order to punish him for his mistake. She is far from admirable and not particularly likable, but her clever and calculated decisions make her interesting.

Would I Teach This Book?

Would I teach The Perfect Divorce? Probably not. I am not in love with the ending, the three perspectives don’t quite hold up, and Sarah is more than a little extra. I have not read the first book in the series, The Perfect Marriage, and perhaps I would feel differently if I had, but there are better books to teach suspense and mysteries. While not perfect, The Perfect Divorce is a decently entertaining read.

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