This mystery follows Sophie as she gets involved with a group of women - the Hunting Wives - lead by the mysterious and alluring Margot Banks. Sophie, her husband, and their young son have recently moved to a small town in Texas when Sophie had grown restless in their old life in Chicago. Sophie had big plans of reinventing herself and her career as a lifestyle blogger but the familiar restlessness found her in a matter of months. The Hunting Wives, at first, is a way for Sophie to inject some excitement into her life. They meet weekly at Margot's cabin to shoot skeet and drink wine and, sometimes, go out to bars and get a little wild. Sophie grows from intrigued to completely obsessed and when a body is found, her new loyalties to the group will be tested when she finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation with secrets on the cusp of being released.
TW: alcohol use, drugging, infidelity
I'll be honest, I had a lot of conflicting feelings about this book. I went and read through some reviews and this seems like a book that people either really like or really dislike. I had enough strong reactions on either side that I ended up pretty in the middle about it overall.
My favorite aspect of this story is, by far, the friend group and their dynamic. Although 'friend group' might be too strong. They really felt more like frenemies to me - almost like the movie Mean Girls but with late 30's Texas socialites. I enjoyed how each woman in the group had their own relationship with each of the other women so everyone felt like distinct characters. I also loved the atmosphere of obsession and almost reverence these other women had for Margot. Margot is definitely the queen bee of the group and she has this very dynamic atmosphere where these other women are dying to be in her orbit no matter what the cost. I thought having Sophie be an outsider at the beginning of the book and then following her integration into this group was really fascinating. These are 100% for sure characters you love to hate and one of the biggest complaints I saw in 1 and 2 star reviews was the fact that these characters are all pretty awful and annoying and who would want to read about a whole group of women who seem to not like each other. Me, that's who! But I can 100% see how the friend group dynamic would put off some readers. For me, I really enjoy reading 'unlikable' characters, especially when those characters lean toward being caricatures and the problems can really only be defined as 'rich people problems'. This friend group was a little over the top, a little overly dramatic, and a little wine drunk at all times and I just had a really fun time reading all of that mess. There is also a really interesting erotic undertones where each of the members of the friend group seem to oscillate between wanting to be Margot and wanting to be with Margot.
The real downfall, for me, was Sophie (which is unfortunate since she is our main character). I found her to be a really inconsistent character who seemed to have these moments when, suddenly, her character completely changed. We start the book pretty much dropped into Sophie's life 8 months after moving to this town. When the book opens, she is already intrigued with Margot and we never really get a real solid reason why. We do flashback briefly when Sophie first sees Margot in a picture on social media and it seems like Sophie sort of falls in love with her immediately. The descriptions of Margot that we get through Sophie are always very sensual and we can feel Sophie fall into obsession with Margot very quickly. However, we also get a good number of times when Sophie is just as obsessed and in love with her own husband so I didn't understand what made Margot so different. We do find out about a person in Sophie's past that seemed to at least look very similar to Margot but that was pushed aside pretty quickly so I'm not sure if that past person had anything to do with anything. For the first few chapters of the book, we see Sophie as being really happy and content with her life. She loves her husband, her kid, and her new life in Texas. So I was thinking that this obsession with Margot might turn into a sort of slow burn tension for the rest of the book and Sophie would slowly change due to Margot's influence. And that sort of happens? But not really. We then find out about Sophie's past and how her living situation when she was growing up instilled this restlessness in her where she's never satisfied with what she has. Which is an interesting character detail and does play a big role in the rest of the story but my issue was this character detail comes in way too late. We've established in the first few chapters - all following Sophie - that she is happy in her life. Then, suddenly, she's telling us that she's not really happy, that she felt unsettled again only a few months after moving. It is this back and forth that happens through the rest of the book that really annoyed me. I think Cobb was going for the feeling that Sophie was struggling with these two pieces of her new life and how to deal with her restlessness but also wanting to keep the family and life she'd built. But it came off, to me, more like inconsistent characterization and I couldn't get a good handle on Sophie.
As far as the mystery/thriller elements go, it was also a miss for me. The prologue of the book is the discovery of the body in the woods. It is literally 10 sentences long and I initially really liked that choice because it gave us a hint of what is to come. However, by the end, I felt like those 10 sentences gave away too much information that overall lowered the tension. The prologue is written in first person POV but we don't know whose perspective we're reading from so it immediately piqued my interest. We don't know who is dead, we don't know where the body is, and we don't know whose perspective we're reading from - sounds like a good foundation for a fun mystery. However, once we get rolling in the story, and everything is from Sophie's POV, I did find that lowered the tension considerably because then I was assuming we were in Sophie's POV for the prologue. This also meant that the one piece of concrete information we're given in the prologue makes it very obvious who the dead person will end up being and, as a result, we lose any real sense of mystery and tension that small prologue initially built. I know some readers always skip the prologues, especially when they're that short, but I normally read them. However, I think in this instance, that skipping would work in your favor. The actual body/murder plot felt like it was added in a later draft of the book and didn't really feel to me like it quite fit the story. I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if it A) stayed more as a domestic thriller with the backstabbing and secrets gradually increasing in severity or B) a different person ended up dead and have them dead earlier on in the story. I think the person who did end up dying caused the main Hunting Wives group to fracture and suddenly my favorite part of the book - the dynamic within the group - was almost non-existent. I think the death happened too late in the book as well so we flip the story from this toxic friend group to amateur murder investigation at about the 65% mark and the murder investigation gets wrapped up relatively quickly. Overall, I think this book should have picked one plot line and followed that through to the end.
The pacing was pretty phenomenal and made me want to keep reading despite the fact that I wasn't loving anything in particular in the story. The chapters have a sort of potato-chip quality where you just want to read one more, then one more, then one more. I think Cobb does a great job at really integrating the reader in this new world of badly behaving socialites and, for me at least, it tapped into that part of my brain that loves office gossip or reading about celebrities. There was so much scandal and backstabbing and passive aggressive comments that I was just enthralled with and it made me want to keep reading. I think the dead body/murder plot was pretty meh, but what did keep me reading was wanting to find out if X person is going to find out about Y issue. I was pretty much reading for all the petty drama and rich people problems and that is where I think the story really shined. There is a lot of drinking in this book - mostly wine but sometimes harder stuff - and it did get a little repetitive. However, the drunker they get the more passive aggressive the women become and the more interested I become in the story. It did feel, especially toward the end, that the alcohol consumption was an easy plot device way to get certain activities or reveals going so I don't think it would work for all readers (especially ones sensitive to alcohol consumption and over-consumption).
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