Best of Psychological Thrillers: The Perfect Wife | JP Delaney (book review)

I will never say no to a new JP Delaney book! If you haven’t read his work before, expect an innovative, heart-pounding, thought-provoking thriller with a stunner of an ending. The Perfect Wife delivers all of this and has a fascinating concept. I can promise you haven’t read anything quite like this lately!

What is The Perfect Wife about?

When Abbie Cullen awakens from what she thinks was a dream, she realizes that she has no memory of how she ended up in the condition she is in. Abbie has always been human and has no reason to think otherwise, until her husband Tim tells her about an accident 5 years earlier that took her life.

Tim is a true titan of the tech world and had been working for years before Abbie’s death on “cobots”—humanlike machines that are able to bring back the memories and body of a loved one…sort of. And now Tim was able to bring Abbie back the same way, as a cobot. Abbie looks exactly as she did before, and she’s been loaded up with all of Abbie’s memories.

As Abbie tries to understand and adjust to her body and piece together her memories, she begins to notice troubling and conflicting things about her husband…and her former self. Can she trust her husband’s version of events? What really happened to Abbie?

What did I think?

There’s so much to this story that I want to talk about. The book opens with Abbie the cobot waking up and learning what her husband Tim has done to bring her back and what her life is like. Tim had been working on this technology before, and the reader gets insight into that through narration from an unnamed male employee who worked for Tim during the years Abbie was there.

Abbie and Tim met through work and eventually fell in love and had a child named Danny who is diagnosed as autistic. Abbie the robot seems to not have full memories of this time, but of course, as robot Abbit learns—Tim controls the memories being uploaded. How does she know what may have been left out?

Things seem great at first, other than some judgment when the news breaks that famous tech mogul Tim Cullen has created a robot version of his wife to bring her back. At first the obvious take from many is that Tim has created some sort of sex robot version of his wife. But as Abbie herself confesses in an interview on national television, she doesn’t even have genitals. She looks like Abbie and has her memories and some of her personality, but she’s certainly not there as a sexual play thing.

But Abbie starts to find other clues that are misleading her. What was the human Abbie up to before she died? And are Tim’s motives pure? Abbie is in the unfortunate position of not trusting either. She begins receiving anonymous, troubling text messages on her cell phone. She finds a secret iPad that she had hidden away and takes it to a tech shop to see if the data can be recovered. And the more she learns, the more complicated it all gets.

This truly is the exact type of book that the term “unputdownable” applies to. I was hooked by the premise, even though it sounded like it could be too sci-fi for me at first. Delaney takes many of the stereotypes about the tech industry and tech genius and flips them around. Tim is unlike any character I’ve read before, and there is a lot to learn about Tim. We get some of it from Abbie, but a different side of Tim from the anonymous employee. I was fascinated by that entire thread of the story—what did outsiders think about Abbie and Tim’s relationship, and Tim himself?

Through the artificial intelligence spin on this story, Delaney makes a bold statement on whether AI that is modeled after a specific person can ever be considered human? What really differentiates humans from computers? And is it possible for one to ever cross that line into the other? An interesting thing about robot Abbie is that she sees herself as a different person than human Abbie, though she recognizes she’s based specifically on human Abbie’s personality and memories.

At one point there is a storyline about a legal battle over the technology and use of personal data to create robot Abbie, and she begins to question what would happen if her memory is wiped. This is troubling to Abbie because she doesn’t see herself as a computer, she sees herself as Abbie—a person with thoughts, feelings, and memories.

There is also a strong storyline about misogyny and how women are viewed. Aside from Abbie, you’ll hear about other women particularly in the tech industry and working for Tim—what is their experience? The book opens with a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

“When Pygmalion saw the way these women behaved, he was disgusted by the many flaws nature has instilled in the female sex, and for a long time lived as a bachelor, without a wife to share his bed.”

This really captures the main theme of the book. Tim wanted to create a version of his wife to bring back—an act that seems to be out of love. But Tim is controlling what memories she has, whether she is able to experience intimacy and other human activities, and what Abbie thinks is normal. She’s the perfect wife, but is that who she was before, or who Tim made her into?

I won’t say any more on the plot so I don’t spoil it, but know that not only is this a completely engrossing story, but it also delivers a few head-spinning plot twists. I loved the way the story ended at the very final moments and what it made me think about after closing the book. This is a brilliant novel and will appeal to sci-fi and thriller fans alike. Captivating!

If you liked The Perfect Wife, what should you read next?

About the Author

JP Delaney is a bestselling author who’s written under several different names, and is a pseudonym for Tony Strong.

People often ask why he chose write under a pseudonym. There’s no great mystery to it – the author likes to write different kinds of books, and publishers and retailers believe it’s confusing for readers to pick up a book by an author they think they know, only to discover it’s a completely different kind of story to the one they were expecting.

Strong thinks that his books have much more in common with each other than they have differences. His work has similar characters, themes and interests that cross between them, including some fun easter eggs. The author believes that writing is inviting the reader to come with him on a journey,  and that as their host and guide it’s his duty to enthrall them.