Review: Only Ever Her by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

Only Ever Her

by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

Pages: 298

Format: eARC

Buy the Book: Amazon

Goodreads:  It was to be the perfect wedding—until the bride disappeared.

Annie Taft’s wedding is four days away, and it will be one of the grandest anyone can remember in her small South Carolina town. Preparations are in order. Friends and family are gathering in anticipation. Everything is going according to plan. Except that Annie herself has vanished. Did she have second thoughts?

Or has something much worse happened to the bride-to-be?

As the days pass, the list of suspects in her disappearance grows. Could it be the recently released man a young Annie misidentified as her mother’s killer? Could it be someone even closer to her?

While her loved ones frantically try to track her down, they’re forced to grapple with their own secrets—secrets with the power to reframe entire relationships, leaving each to wonder how well they really knew Annie and how well they know themselves.

Kritters Thoughts:  Annie Taft is a bride-to-be and just a few days shy of her wedding she turns up missing and everyone is searching for her.  Almost every character in this book had a secret or issue that this wedding would either solve or disrupt and even a few had questionable motives.

I loved this suspense story, but my timing of reading this story maybe was a little off.  In this story Annie Taft's mother was murdered many years ago and the killer is just about to get out of jail and many of the characters wonder if her disappearance have to do with him getting out of jail.  In the book, The Shadow Writer which I read just before this book the mother is also murdered in that one, so I read two books in a row with dead moms, so that aspect of this story felt repetitive, but also had to do with my reading schedule.  

I liked the writing in this story and I love the multiple perspectives.  It was a large cast of characters, but it wasn't too hard to keep them straight.  I always rate this by if I had to get a piece of paper and start writing out names and descriptors and relationships - I didn't have to do that in this one!

I read some reviews after finishing the book and can agree that the plot itself could have felt slow because there wasn't as much action as in other books, but her writing more than surpassed any slowness in the plot's pacing.

I have read a few of Marybeth Mayhew Whalen's backlist, but I have nowhere completed it.  I hope to read more of them in the future.


Rating: definitely a good read, but can't read two in a row

Ebook 2019 Challenge: 22 out of 100

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I received one copy of this book free of charge from Little Bird Publicity.  I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own.