Ralph Truitt, a wealthy businessman with a troubled past who lives in a remote nineteenth-century Wisconsin town, has advertised for a reliable wife; and his ad is answered by Catherine Land, a woman who makes every effort to hide her own dark secrets.
It's the early years of the 20th-century, and troubled young Midwestern girl Catherine Land has learned to fend for herself using a combination of craftiness, sex appeal, and a dim view on conventional morality. So when she sees an advertisement by a wealthy businessman looking for "a reliable wife" she sets off with the intention of marrying him--and then slowly poisoning him with arsenic. However, as their twisted marriage progresses, Catherine and her new husband find their relationship changing in strange and unexpected ways. Robert Goolrick's dark debut novel takes its devilish premise and then spins it out into a satisfyingly complex emotional pattern.
- Genre: Fiction + Literature Themes, Fiction + Literature Genres
- Subgenre: General, Love + Relationships + Sex, Medicine + Health, Literary Genres + Types of Novels
- Publisher: Thorndike Pr
- Pages: 409
- Edition: Large Print
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: January 26, 2010
- Date Published: January 26, 2010
- Author: Robert Goolrick