Just The Nicest Couple: The nail-biting new thriller for 2023 from the New York Times bestselling author of Local Woman Missing

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I had vowed to stop reading Kubica, but the premise sounded so good that I had to give this one a go. This book has all of the makings of a juicy thriller, but the flat characters and messy execution made for a boring read. Kubica says she always loved to write but did not set out to draft thrillers. Rather, she found her way to the genre by accident after writing in a variety of other styles, primarily general women’s fiction. But she knew something was missing because she repeatedly found herself bored with her own manuscripts before she finished them. She began penning thrillers “totally by accident.” The Good Girl was meant to be a love story, but she decided to add some mystery elements, having no idea that the story would end up being “so dark and twisty.” She loved where the writing took her and knew immediately that she had found her niche. Thank you to the author Mary Kubica, publishers Park Row and Harper Collins, and Edelweiss, for an advance digital copy of JUST THE NICEST COUPLE.

Rich with detail and a mounting, almost suffocating sense of dread, Just the Nicest Couple is a dark and twisted exploration of loyalty, family, and how far we'll go to protect the ones we love." --Andrea Bartz, New York Times bestselling author of We Were Never Here Lily doesn’t answer directly. Instead she says, “I didn’t hear you come up the stairs. I thought you were still downstairs.”I have only two thoughts in that moment: staying alive, and that this isn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

Fear takes hold of Lily and Christian’s lives when a high risk pregnancy brings stress instead of happiness. The worry is increased when she bumps into Nina’s husband Jake on a walking trail. Nina and Jake got in a fight and to clear his head he went for a walk, but he never returned home.

Mary Kubica

Fascinating, right?! That's paraphrased because I don't feel like trying to find the passage in my audiobook, but I'm only slightly exaggerating. She does this over and over again. The pace of the book was good, but these descriptions would bog things down and I'd be muttering to myself, "Okay, Nina is opening a letter - we all know how that is done, so can we get ON with it?!"

Some of Mary Kubica's books have been better than others and, unfortunately, "Just the Nicest Couple" is not one of Mary Kubica's better books. This one was a huge miss for me. As far as 75% into the audiobook, nothing had happened besides Nina wondering where her husband is and Lily and Christian worrying about Lily being the last one to see him alive. The slow burn wasn’t suspenseful, it was mostly just boring. The writing is very repetitive. I drop to my knees in front of her. I reach forward and run a hand the length of her hair. “You look exhausted, babe. Do you want to just go to bed? I can help you up. Takeout should be here soon. I’ll bring it up to the room for you when it gets here.” Starting a Mary Kubica book is like opening a bag of M&Ms....you can't eat just one M&M and you can't read just one or two chapters of a Kubica book....I started her latest JUST THE NICEST COUPLE yesterday around 1:45......then all of a sudden I looked up at the window, it was dark outside and I was 70% through with the book.....Jake Hayes is missing. This much is certain. At first, his wife, Nina, thinks he is blowing off steam at a friend’s house after their heated fight the night before. But then a day goes by. Two days. Five. And Jake is still nowhere to be found. Lily Scott, Nina’s friend and coworker, thinks she may have been the last to see Jake before he went missing. After Lily confesses everything to her husband, Christian, the two make a pact not to tell anyone what happened. But Nina is out there looking for her husband, and she won’t stop until the truth is discovered. Two Perspectives First things first, even the blurb on this is B.S. Lily and Christian and Jake and Nina weren’t “close” friends. Lily and Nina were freaking work friends and every once in a while their husbands would be forced into mingling. So now that’s out of the way, the whole premise here is that Jake has gone missing and Lily thinks she might have done a bad bad thing.