Even though Miller can write a good story, I didn’t enjoy reading The Senator’s Wife. I finished the book, because it was interesting, and I was hoping that Miller’s characters would redeem themselves in the end, but they didn’t. My negative impression of the book comes from Miller’s complete disdain and lack of respect for marriage. It can be summed up by these few paragraphs between Delia (one of the main characters) and her grown son Evan. In this scene, Delia greets her son and says

“You are almost unbearably handsome. . .You must be utterly impossible to live with.”

“I am,” he assured her, grinning.

And perhaps this was true. He’d had a messy divorce from his first wife, the mother of his kids, in part because he’d begun a relationship with his second wife before the marriage ended. Delia thought she’d gotten the sense of a tremor or two now in the second marriage, but she wasn’t sure.

Now this brief description of Evan’s failed marriage, abandoned children, unfaithfulness and pending divorce is tragic to me, yet in this book, it is par for the course. All of these are looked at as merely normal circumstances in the course of married life. They happen, and life just moves on. But even more than that, one of Miller’s main characters justifies her unfaithfulness as”…she did what she did…that day for love.” Justifying sin by saying you did it for love. What a sad commentary on sin in our world today.

Although it had a slow start and a slow end, overall this book was very entertaining. Jo Becker is a minister’s wife with an interesting past. When she happens upon a former roommate, her past comes back with a vengeance. As Jo tries to deal with the long-ago unsolved murder of a close friend, she inadvertently solves the mystery.

The one strange thing about this book that didn’t ring true was Jo as a minister’s wife. Jo is very obviously not a believer, yet this doesn’t seem to be an issue for her husband, her marriage or the church. I had a very hard time reconciling this with what I know about pastor’s wives. For some, this might not be a big flaw in the book, but it was very distracting for me.