If you're a successful couples therapist, secure in your happy marriage to a quietly heroic paediatrician and about to publish a book called You Should Have Known, which berates women in failed relationships for ignoring their partners' faults, it's a pretty safe bet that dramatic irony will force you to swallow some of your own bitter medicine before too long. For Grace Reinhart Sachs, the heroine of Jean Hanff Korelitz's fifth novel, the blow is delivered when one of the mothers at her son's elite school is murdered and the police arrive at her door, looking for her husband, Jonathan.
You Should Have Known occupies similar territory to Gone Girl or The Husband's Secret, domestic suspense novels built on the universal fear that we might not know those closest to us as well as we think. Though it begins as a sharp comedy of manners around the lives of New York's super rich, the tone quickly grows darker as the tension mounts. The result is a witty, often insightful examination of marriage with the pace of a psychological thriller.
