Thank you netgalley and the publisher for this ARC!

I am a huge fan of JP Delaney, so I knew when I saw this novel that I had to read it! While I do love the authors writing, this book was a little too far fetched for me. As the future gets more and more developed technologically... it does kind of put into perspective that this could happen!

I do love how suspenseful this book was, it kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time!

Another awesome book by JP Delaney. This was a different sort of novel than the previous mysteries by this author. Initially, I was not sure about it but it hooked me pretty quickly. There are several twists in it so I will not give up too much of the plot.

The story begins as Abbie wakes up with her husband, Tim, by her side. She is told that she was in an accident and must slowly start to put pieces together of her former life. Her husband is the CEO of a major tech company and she is the mother of an autistic child. He insists that they had a blissful marriage and life until her unfortunate accident. As her memory returns, she is not sure that she can trust all that her husband tells her about their idyllic life together. She begins to do her own investigation to her prior life.

All I can say is that this is a page-turner from start to finish. It touches on so many relevant areas from autism and the various treatments for it, to ethics and moral issues. Highly recommended.

Thank you SO much for this ARC.

As a huge fan of JP Delaney, I was so excited to read the authors next novel. This was definitely not my favorite Delaney book. Everything I read from him will always be compared to The Girl Before, which is sooo tough to beat.

However, this was still a great book. A little far fetched but still very cool! Could possibly happen in the future. Perfectly suspenseful.

Very strange as Abbie is almost a cross between "AI" and "You got mail". There is some good pieces here that are even a little "bladerunner-esque". There is a lot going on here and some deep moral issues you will grapple with. Good writing.

This novel is so totally different from anything I expected, so much sci-fi, so little traditional mystery. I did find myself skeptical about this cobot heroine, but as she/it became more real to me, I was more drawn to the book.

Honestly prefer earlier Delaney, this was a new experience and I’m glad that had the opportunity to read it.

Thank you NETGALLEY.

This is the 3rd book by JP Delaney that have read. And it's made me a fan forever. The Perfect Wife kept me wondering all through the book on how it was going to turn out. The ending was a total surprise!!! It doesn't take too long to get to the heart of the story, but then it's just a crazy guessing game about it might turn out. The characters are great. I didn't like some of them, but then, I don't think I was supposed to. Great editing on this book! Can't wait to see what he writes next.

Veeeeeeeery well done! Veeeeeeeeery scary – especially considering the “afterwards”.

At first I thought this was a millennial take on “The Stepford Wives” by Ira Levin. But what I couldn’t figure out (and which was not made clear until the end) was why this book – unlike any other novel I’ve ever read – was written in the second person. It was difficult to know who was chronicling the story and why.

Another reviewer has said it was “riveting and unsettling”. Yes, I agree entirely. This plot was not about marriage, but about the direction our society is taking with the new advances in AI technology.

It was also interesting to see how the author related the teaching of a severely handicapped autistic child to teaching/programming a robot. There’s just a whole lot to be garnered in this book.

I’m very thankful to NetGalley and the publisher, Random House - Ballentine, for an opportunity to read an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This review will be posted immediately on Good Reads and on Amazon and the Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun Co. (publiclibrary.cc) after publication.

Abbie wakes up to discover that not only has she lost 5 years of her life and many of her memories but she is also a robot known as "cobot". Tim is her husband and owns Scott Robotics. The book is told from the point of view of Abbie, the cobot, and her husband Tim's employees. Abbie is telling the present and the employees are telling the reader the past.

If Abbie's memories are in Abbie the cobot then where is the human Abbie? Abbie starts to investigate.

I struggled with the 2nd person person point of view for the robot aka "cobot". The jumping between the present in 2nd person pov and the past 3rd person pov with a little 1st pov thrown in was confusing.

I was curious enough to want to continue the story. Overall the story was just ok for me.

I would like to start by saying I am a huge mystery/thriller fan, though not typically a science fiction reader.

“The Perfect Wife” definitely caught me by surprise, and I’d say veered down the course of science fiction more than thriller - though still very captivating!

Abbie awakens, not knowing where she is or what is happening and soon finds out she died five years ago. Through the wonders of artificial intelligence and thanks to her billionaire husband, she has been brought back to life.

Her son, Danny, has autism, and as a side note, before ending my review, I needed to say how much I appreciated his character and his relationship with Abbie!

An eerie concept - why? You may think a devoted husband was simply bringing back the wife he loved and missed... but there’s much, much more to the story.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher of The Perfect Wife for giving me the opportunity to pre read this extraordinary book. JP Delaney has turned the usual psychological thriller upside down. There are moments reminiscent of Brave New World intermingled with a human perspective. The author weaves such a tale between Abby before and Abby after. Her characters and the story is so thought out. I especially enjoyed Danny and learning more about autism. This book was a thriller wrapped up in a sci-fi tale with a hint of horror.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review*

emoji rating scale: 😩🙁😐😀😍
The Perfect Wife rating: 😀

This is my first ready by J P Delaney. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that uses first / second POV, but wow , way to make a creepy book even creepier. Psychological thriller meets sci-fi* meets mystery in a perfectly twisted, can’t-put-down read.

*I can solidly say that I am normally anti sci-fi, but don’t knock this book until you try it (about five pages in I considered giving up on it, but I’m so glad I didn’t!)

I really don’t want to give too much away here because I don’t want to ruin the thriller-style story line, so I’m sorry that this review airs on the side of vague. Delaney writes on a subject that isn’t too far from our future: cobots, an idea of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to recreate a human connection with someone you’ve lost. *creepy already*
“You try to imagine what he’s been through, what those last five years much have been like. In some ways, you realize, you had it easy. You simply died. He’s the one who suffered.”

After mega-techie, Tim Scott’s wife, Abbie, mysteriously disappears, and an AI cobot ‘Abbie’ is brought “back from the dead” (Tim’s creation), this book becomes a race against time to put together all the puzzle pieces of what happened during the last five years, and more importantly, what happened to the real Abbie.

Jumping from present to past, this book carefully threads together a story that left me trying to read as fast as I could to get to the end. There were so many moving parts to this book, but they somehow all worked seamlessly together.
“You’re saying I died.” You stare up at him. “You’re saying the real me died–what? Five years ago. And you’ve somehow brought me back like this.”

Releasing in August 2019, if you’re a thriller junkie like myself, this needs to be on your TBR shelf. I don’t want to give away anymore than that, so you’re just going to have to give it a read and chat with me after!

I received an advance reader copy of this book through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. When I first began reading this book, I didn’t think I would like the book. The premise of an emotional support robot with artificial intelligence is definitely not on my usual reading list. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I actually was mesmerized by this book. Please don’t automatically pass over this book because you think it’s science fiction. It is so much more!

I loved Delaney's previous book so I was thrilled to receive an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I usually don't like sci-fi books, but from the first page I was taken in with the story, unsure of where it was going to go and quickly found myself immersed with the details of the characters. I read a good amount of thrillers and can usually figure out the story and I was way off with this one and I love that it kept me guessing until the very end. I don't want to give too much away, but thought the storyline with the autistic child was real and heart wrenching.

When is the next book out from Delaney? :)

Abbie awakens with no memory of who she is or how she landed in this unsettling condition. The man by her side claims to be her husband. He's an icon of the tech world, the founder of a lucrative robotics company. He tells Abbie that she is a gifted artist, an avid surfer, a loving mother to their young son, and the perfect wife. He says she had a terrible accident five years ago, and that, through a huge technological breakthrough, she has been brought back from the abyss. She is a miracle of science. 

But as Abbie pieces together memories of her marriage, she begins questioning her husband's motives--and his version of events. Can she trust him when he says he wants them to be together forever? And what really happened to Abbie half a decade ago?

This is a must read. The actual thriller begins in the second half of the book. Certain parts of the plot might be unconventional but i loved unraveling the story and finding out the truth. Amazing read, definitely recommend.

This is a tough one.

I've read a couple of people's reviews of this book. They also struggled to find a category to put it in. Some call it sci-fi and others call it a mystery. I'm going to call it "intriguing".

Until the final couple of chapters, I was all set to give this book five stars. It's cleverly done, easy to follow, has great character development, spins a good mystery . . . . it's a really fine book. And then came the ending. I didn't see it coming and wasn't too happy with it. A more traditional ending might have tied up the loose ends a bit better.

Ending aside, this is a really fine read. I've read a few Delaney books now and been very pleased with all of them.

Keep 'em coming . . . and tell us who you are!

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. The Perfect Wife is due for publication in August 2019.

First, I would like to point out that second-person POV is the most difficult for an author to use. Abbie's chapters are written in second person and J.P. Delaney does a fantastic job of immersing the reader in the story in this way.

Admittedly, the beginning and the ending of this book frustrated me. I am not particularly a fan of sci-fi, and after reading the synopsis of this book, sci-fi is not the genre you would initially anticipate. (After reading the synopsis again, I suppose it makes sense, but it is not immediately apparent.) I must admit that I was turned off by the sci-fi element that is so crudely introduced to you in the first three chapters. I recall being equally turned off by the beginning of Stephenie Meyers' "The Host," but I ended up absolutely loving that book, so much so that I was inspired to draw again for the first time in years after reading it. But I digress. The point is, don't let the sudden and unexpected reveal that Abbie is in fact a robot—who has been constructed by a mourning husband to be an emotionally capable replacement for the wife he lost—cause you do turn away from this book. As Abbie's awareness grows and she experiences memories of real-life Abbie and discovers clues that indicate that real-life Abbie and Tim's marriage was not what it appeared to be on the surface, you will struggle to put the story down. I finished this book in two short sittings.

As for my problem with the ending, it simply doesn't make sense. Abbie's chapter 83 is not congruent with the narrator's chapter 'TWENTY-SIX,' which immediately follows chapter 83 in the dual storyline. I read these chapters three times each to see if I was just missing something, but I'm certain they are contradictory. Two different accounts of what happened are given here, and what happens in Abbie's chapter makes what happens in the narrator's description in the other chapter impossible. In fact, there are major plot holes pertaining to the ending as a whole, but I do not want to put any spoilers here. I feel that the ending, and these two chapters in particular, deserve a second look and major editing before the final book is released. This disparity has left me feeling incomplete and has made it difficult to rate the book.

Considering the storyline itself, I feel that robot Abbie is nothing like real-life Abbie, and this poses a problem. The characters in the story are taken aback by how "similar" robot Abbie is, but let's be frank. Real-life Abbie wouldn't put up with all the crap Tim pulls on her. Robot Abbie is just the “perfect wife” she has been told to be and lets Tim get away with far too much. However, the rest of the storyline is actually really good. The psychological struggle that robot Abbie experiences is relatable for anyone who questions their self-worth or relationships with others. She finds an inner strength as she becomes more independent, and she becomes more human even as she increasingly accepts her non-humanness.

After writing this review, I feel that 3/5 stars are appropriate until the ending is edited to make sense and be consistent with the rest of the story. I want to give the book a better rating, but I find that I am simply just too bothered by the inattention that was paid to details at the conclusion. This book could be exceptional with just a little more editing.

#netgalley #theperfectwife

This book took me by surprise. The description sounded interesting and I thought it was going to be your ordinary run-of-the-mill psychological thriller. It most definitely was not! It brought up a lot of interesting and thought-provoking issues of what it means to be human, how technology infiltrates our lives, and more. I stayed up late finishing it and I found myself thinking about this book for days later. The book was very readable and compelling. I have to say that the epigraph and the author's own personal notes at the end (under acknowledgements) made me close the book and just go, "wow."

This book is best for those who don't mind a little (or a LOT) of science fiction and technology in their psychological thrillers---if you like Blake Crouch, this might be up your alley.

Thanks Randomhouse for reaching out with a #netgalley copy of The Perfect Wife. #bookstagrammers preorder now to make sure you have one of the hottest books on the beach this August!

Abbie awakes in what appears to be a hospital, her limbs move strangely, she has bandages, her voice sounds strange and machines are beeping all around her. It must have been an accident...but she’s fine now, right? It’s no spoiler to tell you that you find out in the first chapter that Abbie isn’t Abbie anymore, she’s artificial intelligence—a robot. Don’t worry, author JP Delaney hasn’t veered from his standard thriller genre into sci-fi, Abbie soon finds that her technology genius husband Tim may be hiding as much information from her as he’s downloaded into her new form.

This book delves into the complications that AI brings to life and the culture of misogyny in today’s tech sector even as the mystery of the original Abbie unfolds. This is the first fiction I’ve read that addresses #metoo without making me feel like it was added in just because it’s trending. Delaney makes this central to the suspense and it works.

I’ll be honest, I’m still a tiny bit confused by the last few chapters. I read back over them several times and while I think I’ve got the facts, I’m a bit confused on the timeline and the motivations @jpdelaney can I DM you some questions?

Giving this one 4.5 stars, Delaney just keeps getting better!

The Perfect Wife is one of the most creative stories I've read in ages -- I loved it! While many reviewers refer to it as being in the sci-fi category, I felt differently. I devoured it as a modern day psychological thriller. It begins with the story of a missing, presumed dead young mother and artist named Abbie. As best it can be determined, Abbie went night surfing in Northern California and never returned to shore, nor did her body ever resurface. The police and public opinion are sure her husband, tech genius Tim Scott murdered her, but with no body and no crime scene, he is let off.

Now, the creative part of the novel. After Abbie disappears Tim dedicates himself to recreating her down to the most minute nuance of her personality in the form of a cobot, a companion bot. When in Chapter 1 we meet Abbie, we are actually meeting the Abbie cobot. She is human in almost every way and has all of Abbie's memories and intellect. I think it's essential to stress that as a reader, I never thought of her in any way other than an emotional, feeling being, which is why I didn't find it to be "sci-fi" at all.

As the story progresses, Abbie begins to learn more about her life with Tim and goes searching for the truth behind her disappearance. She also develops a strong maternal bond with their autistic son Danny, which is a fascinating element to this novel. I was hooked every step of the way and read this novel in short order. It never dragged, and each character was extremely well developed. The story is told in second and third person, which makes reading slightly wonky, but it's for a very good reason so just stick with it.

Thank you NetGalley and Ballantine Books/Random House for providing me a digital ARC of The Perfect Wife. I highly recommend it!

I received this title from netgalley in exchange for my honest review/opinion. Well, this book was not what I expect, and different. All in a good way. It was definitely sci-fi meets suspense thriller. In a good way though. Definitely a good read. This author is great.