Have you read Pretty Little Wife and have questions about the plot? Need to discuss spoilers? Come read my Spoilers and Plot Summary for Pretty Little Wife
First, I’ll run through a quick plot summary. Pretty Little Wife spoilers will be at the end of the post. If you do NOT want spoilers, check out my spoiler-free review of Pretty Little Wife!
Plot Summary for Pretty Little Wife
Lila and Aaron each had traumatic childhoods that are affecting their marriage. He’s controlling, while she’s secretive and distant. He’s a high school math teacher, she’s a lawyer turned realtor. Lila finds a secret phone belonging to Aaron. The phone has videos of him having sex with young women she suspects are his students. She confronts him and they fight. He says she’s overreacting and that he has it “handled.”
Six weeks later, Aaron doesn’t show up for work. Lila is puzzled as she left Aaron’s car in the school parking lot … with his body in it.
Ginny, the investigator assigned to the case, questions Lila. So Lila points out that several young college students in the area are also missing.
Jared, Aaron’s brother, also comes to see Lila. The brothers are close after both their parents died tragically. Each brother has a trust fund from a settlement following a hunting accident that killed their mother. Their father was later killed in a hit and run.
Then Ginny and her sidekick Pete discover that Lila didn’t seem to exist before age 21. Lila explains that she changed her name after her father kidnapped, raped and murdered one of her friends.
Lila starts getting mysterious notes on her car: “This Isn’t Working Out Like You Planned” and “You’ve Been Very Naughty.”
The police zero in on Ryan, a real estate client of Lila’s and also a professor in the sociology of crime. Were they having an affair?
Brent, Aaron’s boss, confronts Lila about not taking part in a search party to find Aaron. He suggests she knows what happened to him. So Lila says she will tell the police Brent asked Aaron to borrow money, causing tension between her and Aaron.
Lila confesses her affair with Ryan to the police and they tell her Ryan was writing a book about her father.
Lila confronts Ryan. The police arrive and Ginny tells Ryan and Lila she found Aaron’s phone in Ryan’s house.
Finally, Aaron’s body is found!
Aaron’s phone leads them to his GPS. The police find Aaron’s body inside his SUV, which was parked outside a remote cabin. The body of one of the missing college students was inside the cabin.
Lila gets another note that says, “Fixed your mess. You’re welcome.”
Lila meets with Samantha, one of Aaron’s victims. She had approached Samantha weeks ago and told her about all the other girls. Samantha accuses Lila of murdering Aaron.
Spoilers for Pretty Little Wife
The police show Lila photos of the cabin. In them, she recognizes a familiar rocking chair. She drives out to the cabin and Jared is there. He and Aaron each had an identical chair. While Aaron liked sleeping with underage blondes, Jared stalked and killed brunettes. Jared abducted and killed the missing college students. He bought the cabin in Aaron’s name to hold his victims after he abducted them.
Jared knew Lila killed Aaron and was the one writing the taunting notes to her. Jared knew Lila had found Aaron’s sex videos and was spying on her using cameras he installed outside her house. He saw her drive off early in the morning with Aaron’s body. He took the body and froze it, along with the body of the missing college student.
Jared explains that his father was also a depraved killer who organized “hunting” parties with human prey. Their father was responsible for their mother’s death. When he got senile and started talking, Jared ran him down.
Jared tries to tell Lila that all three of them (Jared, Lila, Aaron) are the same – psychopaths.
Lila attacks Jared with a hammer. He gets it away from her and the two struggle. Lila then stabs him with a screwdriver she had hidden in the clothes. She tells him she already knew about the cabin. She followed Aaron there weeks ago. Her goal was to kill both brothers and end the cycle of violence.
Police arrive at the cabin and Lila says that Jared killed all the women and framed Aaron for it. They aren’t really sure what the truth is but they decide to take Lila’s word for what happened.
Ginny visits Lila and says she knows that Lila is getting all the brothers’ trust fund money after their death. She knows that Lila found out both brothers’ secrets and plotted to kill them both.
Lila says most of the estate money is going to families of the victims.
Spoiler Discussion for Pretty Little Wife
What did you think of Lila? I found her hard to relate to through most of the story. She was really closed-off and well … a murderer! It’s not until the end that we see that she planned the WHOLE thing.
Who did you suspect moved Aaron’s body? At first I was sure that Ryan was responsible. He was kind of a creeper. But then I started fixating on Jared.
What was Lila’s plan for Jared? She said she knew about the cabin all along, so was she waiting for the police to discover it? What if he killed more women in the meantime? Why was no one at the cabin but Jared if it was a crime scene?
If Lila was on to Jared all along, why didn’t she figure out he was the one leaving the notes?
Did we ever find out how Lila killed Aaron? It sounds like she staged his body as a carbon-monoxide caused suicide in his car, but how did he actually die? (I am curious!)
Join Our Discussion for Pretty Little Wife!
What other questions do you have about Pretty Little Wife and what do you want to discuss?? Let’s talk in comments!
If you loved Pretty Little Wife, check out Darby Kane’s new book, What the Wife Knew!
I just finished this book and for the most part, I enjoyed it! I started to suspect Jared towards the end of the book. Before I suspected him I was hoping they would become close since they “understood” each other and that maybe, just maybe she would find One decent male to trust in and develop a loving relationship with but NOPE!! She was betrayed and lied to by every male she got close to except for Tobias, her lawyer. The ending did surprise me though, I didn’t expect Lila to have known about BOTH brothers and then plot their undoing 😉 Loved it!
I kept going back and forth about Jared. I agree that I was getting possible romantic vibes, but then sometimes also a weird vibe from him. The characters were all pretty unsympathetic but I thought all the story strands tied up really neatly and the fact that she was plotting against both of them was definitely a surprise.
I felt like Cassie was under explored, but I enjoyed the read!!
Cassie the neighbor? Yeah, I couldn’t figure her out!
Yes! I was waiting for her to either become more of a suspect OR maybe something of a heroine or wing woman.
Oooh, interesting. It would have been good if she were an amateur detective, pretending to bring over banana bread, while actually trying to crack the case of the missing husband. She seemed like she would know everything that was going on in the neighborhood.
Lila pumped carbon monoxide through the ac vents to the spare bedroom where Aaron was sleeping. He did die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
I was not a fan of Lila knowing Jared was in on it too and her waiting for several weeks to craft a plan to get them both. What if he had murdered another girl in the mean time? I know getting to murder him would be cathartic, but Lila is smart, and it seems like she could have alerted cops to to the cabin and gotten it linked to Jared earlier.
Thank you Libby! How did I miss that?? I think I was turning those pages too fast. Yeah, all three characters were pretty unlikable. The two brothers were horrible and Lila not much better. I agree that her waiting was problematic, though maybe she’d argue she was watching him. But she couldn’t be watching him all the time!
A couple of things that rubbed me the wrong way include the fact that even though Lila mentions going to the cabin, she also mentions driving away and not looking into it. Why did she feel guilty snooping on Jared if she knew what he was doing? Why did she say that losing Jared was worse than losing Aaron if she was planning on killing him all along? Why did she keep comforting him when she knew what he was doing? Lila couldn’t fake-grieve her own husband to throw off suspicion but she found it easy to fake.comfort her brother in law who she knew to be a serial-killer? I felt like the book was very well written up until the Jared reveal, because most of what we were presented before conflicted with the conclusion.
I agree that her feelings toward Jared were weird, given what she knew, and that after the Jared-is-a-serial-killer reveal the book made a lot less sense.
Agreed with Areej. To me this would be a truly amazing thriller were it not for that one final twist. Areej lists several items that don’t make sense. I’ll add that nowhere in her internal dialogue does her knowledge that Jared is in on it come up. This is worse IMO than being illogical. She’s cheating, basically by feeding the reader deceptive info. The novel didn’t really need that final twist (though it does explain some things, like why she was so disturbed about letting down the final victim.)
Hi Matthew! You mean the author was cheating by withholding that information until the end? I agree that thrillers and mysteries need to play by certain rules on what is revealed to the reader. The unreliable narrator is a tough one and I agree that I felt a little betrayed to find out that Lila hadn’t mentioned that pivotal fact at all.
Yes, I do mean the author. Cheating is kind of a weird word but, yeah, the author is breaking an unwritten rule. I’ll add to be clear that otherwise the plotting is exceptionally good given the complexity of the story. All of the other twists and reveals are really well earned I think. It’s tough, I recognize, to write an entertaining thriller that doesn’t disappoint in the end.
I get it! I think there should be some sense of fair play between mystery/thriller author and reader. Lately it seems to me that authors try to have one last shocking twist that pulls the rug out from under the reader. But having a POV character withhold such a crucial piece of information does feel a bit like cheating!