THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE WILD

How little can you know about the husband you love? A Sacramento woman is about to find out.

Liv Russo awakens in a storage building in far-distant Alaska to the bitter memory that the husband whose death she’s mourned has imprisoned her and has no plans to let her go. Zigzagging between Then and Now, Liv gradually reveals the circumstances behind Mark Russo’s phony suicide: After Rick, who’d hired him at his motorcycle shop, started smuggling drugs to cover his debts, Mark agreed to help in exchange for a cut of the profits, then lost a truckload of methamphetamine to a thief and decided to fake his death and not tell his wife. Liv, who’s recently been through some unwelcome highs and some devastating lows, uncovers evidence that sends her and their 7-year-old son, Xander, up north on his trail and finds him shacked up with Angela, a much younger mate whose relations with him clearly aren’t platonic, and 10-year-old Rudy, whose parentage isn’t entirely clear. When Liv says she’s leaving to find a divorce lawyer and tell the authorities where Mark is, Mark swipes her phone, wallet, and car keys; locks her up; and refuses to release her until she accepts her place in what he high-handedly styles his alternative utopian community. Even after Liv toes the party line far enough to earn release from her confinement, her subordination to the man she once loved renders her status not only dangerously marginal but grindingly creepy. The finale is stuffed with so many surprises that it feels like a long-deferred Christmas morning.

Still another salvo in the suspense genre’s attack on the sanctities of marriage.