The Book:
Her Perfect Twin by Sarah Bonner
Published September 27th 2022 by Grand Central Publishing
Date read: October 6, 2022
The Characters:
Megan
Buy it on Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Plot (from Goodreads):
When Megan discovers photographs of her estranged identical twin sister on her husband’s phone, she wants answers.
Leah already has everything Megan has ever wanted. Fame, fortune, freedom to do what she wants. And when Megan confronts Leah, an argument turns to murder.
The only way Megan can get away with killing her twin is to become her.
But then lockdown hits. How can she continue living two lives? And what happens if someone else knows her secret too?
The Twist:
Megan killed Leah because she was mad that Leah kept stealing her boyfriends–including having an affair with her husband, Chris. She spent a while playing the part of both twins while deciding what to do with Leah’s body. She then decided to make Megan disappear instead and spend the rest of her life as Leah, as it was the perfect way to escape her abusive husband.
Unfortunately, Chris had caught on to her plan. Megan was planning to escape just before the Covid lockdowns started, but she was just barely too late. Instead, she was forced to shelter in place with Chris, who knew what she had done.
The story switches to Chris’s POV, and we learn that he has been drugging and gaslighting Megan while having his affair with Leah. He had placed cameras all over Leah’s house, so he saw what Megan did. He brought Leah’s body to their house in order to frame Megan, but first he needed Megan to transfer Leah’s money to him.
Megan wasn’t taking Chris’s drugs, though. She drugged him back and set up the house to look like he was holding her captive, but started pretending to be Leah. She maintained that Chris had killed Megan and taken Leah hostage.
The Ending:
Chris was arrested, but he knew she wasn’t Leah. However, his whole defense was based on a scar that Megan had. Megan was pretending to be Leah when she got the scar (she didn’t have a license so she borrowed Leah’s license and car, got in an accident, and went to the hospital as Leah) so the hospital paperwork backed up her assertion that she was Leah.
The Review:
Whenever I start a “twin” book, I know the narrator is going to be unreliable. Which twin is this really? Have they switched places yet?
HER PERFECT TWIN drew me in from the start with a murder and a plot to escape a bad marriage. And then Covid lockdowns foiled Megan’s plans for escape, which I thought was so well-written. I remember joking to my boyfriend about cheaters having a bad time during Covid, and Sarah Bonner turned around and wrote a book about it! Don’t worry, the lockdown was just a few scenes long and used as a plot device–it didn’t drag out.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but HER PERFECT TWIN definitely stood out against all the other “twin” novels I’ve read recently–and there have been a lot of them.
This was a really great debut, and I can’t wait to see what this author will write next.
Audio Review: This full-cast narration was performed by Daphne Kouma, David Morley Hale, and George Weightman. I enjoyed listening to a different narrator for each perspective, and loved the audio production overall.
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