Only Ever Her

by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

Amazon US / UK / CA / AU / B&N

Paperback: 298 Pages

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (May 7, 2019)

It was to be the perfect wedding—until the bride disappeared.

Annie Taft’s wedding is four days away, and it will be one of the grandest anyone can remember in her small South Carolina town. Preparations are in order. Friends and family are gathering in anticipation. Everything is going according to plan. Except that Annie herself has vanished. Did she have second thoughts?

Or has something much worse happened to the bride-to-be?

As the days pass, the list of suspects in her disappearance grows. Could it be the recently released man a young Annie misidentified as her mother’s killer? Could it be someone even closer to her?

While her loved ones frantically try to track her down, they’re forced to grapple with their own secrets—secrets with the power to reframe entire relationships, leaving each to wonder how well they really knew Annie and how well they know themselves.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Louise is one of the richest women in town but not one of the smartest. She was once quite the beauty, but that ship has sailed. She spends most of her time standing on the dock waving a hanky, begging it to come back to her. Which means she spends a lot of time in Faye’s salon.

She has always respected and feared lawyers, as if they possess something she never could, some special insight into truth and justice, a gift bestowed on them at birth, like a pitching arm or a brilliant mind.

She is standing by Faye’s elbow, annoyingly close. Faye can smell the determination on her like alcohol on a barfly.

Faye has already grown to hate that word, missing, the snakelike quality of it, the way people’s tongues get stuck on the S’s. It makes her unfairly angry at Millicent for saying it just like that, a hiss instead of a word… She is already anticipating tragedy, tasting it on her tongue like the ham that comes with funerals.

He’s heard you don’t have to let cops in unless they have a warrant, so he has no intention of throwing open his door, of saying, Come on in, fellas. Cops are like vampires; they have to be invited in, but once you invite them in, they have the power.

My Review:

I waffled a bit in how to rate this tautly written, absorbing, and well-crafted book. Yet when looking at my marked quotes, my indecision promptly evaporated as the sublime quality of Ms. Whalen’s writing removed all doubt. The evolution of the story was incrementally slow and told with a multiple POV, yet all the pieces proved to be necessary and an increasing level of tension and additional layers of intrigue steadily inched forward with each compelling chapter. I feared many loose ends – silly me! This cunning and cleverly perceptive wordsmith wrapped them all up rather neatly, and for the most part, unexpectedly. Lesson learned, I unswervingly pledge I will never second-guess her extraordinarily nimble skill for subterfuge again.

About the Author

Marybeth Mayhew Whalen is the author of When We Were Worthy, The Things We Wish Were True, and five previous novels. She speaks to women’s groups around the United States and is the co-founder of the popular women’s fiction site She Reads (www.shereads.org). Marybeth and her husband, Curt, have been married for twenty-seven years and are the parents of six children. Marybeth divides her time between the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the coastline of Sunset Beach, North Carolina. You can find her at www.marybethwhalen.com.