Spoiler-Free Review

I read The Wife Between Us by this same author duo a year ago and was underwhelmed – I had guessed the major plot twist. So I wanted to give The Golden Couple a try to see if I might like it better…I didn’t. I think these authors just aren’t for me.

What’s The Golden Couple about?

An ex-therapist with a revoked license (who still does “consultations”) agrees to help a couple with their struggling marriage, but they’re hiding more lies than she initially thinks.

This book was basic.

While there were some interesting things about this story, like the strange cast of side characters, my overall impression was that it was a fairly basic mystery premise without a lot of direction.

Most of the characters felt like archetypes rather than people. They just felt like characters I’ve seen a million times in the same kinds of stories. On top of that, I often felt their behavior didn’t make sense. I had to suspend disbelief way too often, especially as convenient personal ties between characters became apparent.

Another issue I had with this story was that it was less about solving one key mystery, but rather about unraveling lies. Which meant that as a story, not a lot was really happening. I will say I didn’t guess the ending – but neither did it totally shock me. I think it was because a lot of the information I would’ve needed to make an accurate guess wasn’t thrown in until near the end, so it was just missing that emotional punch. Plus, the ending felt detached from everything else we’d just read, and the character reactions didn’t strike me as realistic.

I listened to the audiobook, and I felt the narrators did a good job. But the writing itself was so plain and uninteresting that I could actually listen to this one at 2.75x speed – which is far faster than I can usually go. There was so much info dumping, and the entire story was told instead of shown. There were some parts, particularly in the first half, where the writing had me so viscerally annoyed that I wasn’t sure I could finish.

Should you read The Golden Couple?

If you like twisty domestic mystery/thrillers that keep you guessing and don’t mind plain writing style, you may enjoy this as a quick and easy read. But, if you like more complexity, emotional depth, and true twists that still feel like it makes sense for the story, it probably won’t be for you.

If you’re looking for a mystery with a therapist main character, I liked The Silent Patient more.