When her husband dies from an overdose of sleep medication and alcohol, Rose Yates leaves Milwaukee with her eleven-year-old son to return to her father’s house in Bury, New Hampshire.  Special Investigating Agent, Colin Pearson, is convinced Rose’s husband did not die by his own hand and wonders if Rose is hiding something.  As he follows her to Bury, New Hampshire in search of answers, he uncovers more than he bargains for in THE DEAD HUSBAND by Carter Wilson.

Rose knows returning to the childhood home that haunts her dreams is a risk, but Rose is ready to start tackling the demons of her past.  The Yates family has always been a little different with Logan Yates as the domineering father and Cora, Rose’s sister, as an indescribable anomaly hidden behind a perfect exterior.  A horrific crime occurred at 1734 Rum Hill Road twenty-years ago and the oppressive energy still lingers in the hallways and on the stairs.  As Rose and her son, Max, rejoin the family, Rose starts to confront the past and sets a plan in motion that will expose the family’s dark secret.  Rose is a mystery writer and has just sent a manuscript to her publisher, which will rock the Yates family to the core.  

Meanwhile, Detective Pearson is trying to prove Rose’s complicity in her husband’s death.  While investigating, he learns of a missing teenager from twenty years ago.   The last person to see the teenager was Cora Yates.  Knowing there is a connection; Detective Pearson goes in pursuit of the truth.

Wilson has penned a page-turner with an absolutely cold and calculating killer.  He takes us to Bury, New Hampshire where evil lurks behind the facade of mansions and manicured lawns.  Rose Yates is a damaged woman grappling with a horrific event that happened when she was seventeen.  Raised with the cold and distant Yates family, she knows what they are capable of and whom she must fear.  The characters Wilson creates are both fascinating and damaged and the atmosphere is dark and menacing as the plot twists and turns down a road of no return.  This novel is compulsively readable and the showdown at the end is a fitting conclusion to the story as well as the final reveal of the husband’s killer.

Well-written and filled with chilling moments, the atmosphere feels as cold as the New Hampshire snow.  THE DEAD HUSBAND is a chilling, mesmerizing story of how one family protects a killer and how the ripples of crime affect generations to come.