Love, letters and lethal infidelity among friends

Unfaithfully Yours

In the opening chapter, one of the group, Elizabeth Price, writes to private detective Roland ‘Orlando’ Gibbons asking him to investigate her philanderer husband whom she suspects is having an affair. Her correspondence unwittingly opens up a real can of worms.

The plot revolves around four married couples, who on the face of things were best of friends back in the day — even taking holidays together — but are now estranged, even though they are all still married to each other and live only streets apart.

Incidentally, one of them is now dead — the circumstances of which are a little murky to say the least.

Each chapter brings a new letter told from a different perspective, revealing a little more about each character and the marriage in which they have become trapped.

One thing becomes increasingly clear. Nobody married the right person . . .

It gets very confusing in the struggle to remember who is unhappily wed to whom — and, more intriguingly, who has slept with someone who isn’t their spouse (which, without giving the game away, is pretty much everyone). This lot bring a whole new meaning to the term infidelity.

Briefly, we have a woman who died a few years previously in suspicious circumstances (Pamela) who was unhappily married to Mike, who now despises womanising rogue (Gerry) who appears to have slept with everyone. There’s his bitter wife (Elizabeth, who wrote the initial letter), closet gay dentist (Sam) and his wife (Mary) who engages in a variety of affairs to escape her sexless marriage, advice columnist and doctor (John) who is married to Barbara — the self-titled Group Bitch who also writes bestselling novels — but who ends up with someone entirely different. And private detective Orlando is thrown into the mix as well, as he sleeps with one of the women and then falls in love with another . . .

Confused? You will be. But somehow it doesn’t matter. In his first new novel in a decade, Williams writes in a humorous, seemingly effortless style and keeps the reader entertained, albeit a little baffled. We become preoccupied with finding out what happened to shake up this once close-knit bunch, and who decided that the unpopular Pamela was doomed to die.

It’s a fascinating, slightly absurd, not always plausible but highly amusing who-dunnit-style insight into what goes on behind closed doors in suburbia and proves that the pen is often mightier — and far more cruel and revealing — than the sword.

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