Six divorcees seek revenge on their deceitful spouses, but someone starts taking it much too far…

Emily had the perfect life – the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect husband – before she was blindsided and betrayed and lost it all. Now she’s sitting in a divorce counselling group wondering how she’ll ever feel okay again. What she wants is her old life back, and these group sessions seem to be the only way she’ll be able to move on – past the jealousy, the hurt, and the daydreams of getting revenge.

And it seems everyone in the group is in the same boat: jilted by an ex-partner and struggling to cope. So over post-therapy drinks, the six divorcées come up with the brilliant idea to get a little payback of their own – Strangers-on-a-Train style, with each getting even on another’s behalf. Nothing serious – just enough to disrupt their former partner’s picture-perfect lives.

Emily is hesitant at first, but the more her old life spins away from her, the less she worries about her morals – plus, they agreed no one would get hurt.

But just when the group think they’ve pulled off the perfect petty crimes, one of the exes is found dead… and then another… and another…

With DI Rosa Hawkes on their case and the plan spiralling out of control, Emily doesn’t know who she can trust, and if divorce taught her anything, it’s that you can’t trust anyone, even the people you love. Especially the people you love. Let alone perfect strangers like these.

THE OTHELLO CLUB
Suspense Crime Thriller
BY J.D. PENNINGTON

Excerpt

“But jealous souls will not be answered so.

They are not ever jealous for the cause,

But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster

begot upon itself, born on itself.”

William Shakespeare, Othello

1

Emily

2 May

Nobody was supposed to get hurt. She drew a line. No violence. They all swore agreement. But one of them has broken their covenant and redrawn that line in blood.

Emily perches on a leather armchair, one of six arranged in a ritualistic circle, attempting to recalibrate her spiralling thoughts. Dulled to the drone of Malcolm, their group therapist, she studies the faces of her five accomplices. For signs of culpability, or contrition, but realising with terrifying lucidity how little she knows about them. If divorce taught her anything, it’s that you can’t trust anyone. Even the people you love. Especially the people you love. Let alone perfect strangers like these.

Fear billows through her, carrying with it a fresh wave of nausea. She fights the urge to vomit. Or rather, dry heave, the contents of her stomach already disgorged following the shock of that heinous news headline. After scouring the details online, Emily swore never to return to this toxic cabal. Every instinct screaming to take flight. To call the police and end this aberrant madness. Yet here she is, compelled to uncover the malefactor among them. The only thing she is sure of is that one of them is guilty of this atrocity.

Or, it occurs to Emily, perhaps they all are.

2

Rosa

25 May

Love is brutal…” I crane forward, resting my elbows on the interview table. “Believe me, I know. In fifteen years as a detective, I’ve witnessed every act of cruelty possible. But nothing compares to the savagery of crimes committed in the name of love. Especially when its pathology turns to hate.”

I select one of the crime scene photographs fanned across the table and dangle it in the suspect’s face like a macabre tarot reading. Her emerald gaze remains fixed on mine. Emily Hunter is a girlish thirty-three. At five foot eleven, she looms over me by four inches. She could have just breezed off a catwalk, save for her broad swimmer’s shoulders.

“Why won’t you look at the photographs, Emily?” I keep my tone agreeable, to relax the suspect, and reveal more pretext.

“Why do you think?” Cool as Kasparov, Emily exposes none.

“Guilt?”

“Not in the way you’re implying, Inspector. I am not responsible for that.”

“Who do you think is responsible, Emily?” DS Sean Nicholls breaks the spell.

I’d almost forgotten my balding colleague was there. If not for the smell of cedar wood oil from his moustache, perched above his mollifying smile.

Emily turns her tractor-beam on him. “I’ve told you everything I know, Detective Nicholls.”

Unlike the suspect, I can read Nicholls like a trashy airport novel. He’s like a mesmerised teenager interviewing a starlet for the school newsletter.

“Need I remind you, innocent people are dead, Emily, brutally murdered.”

Emily’s jaw muscles tighten. A signifier of anger. Triggered by something I said. Brutally murdered? No, innocent was the inciting word.

“You don’t consider them innocent, do you, Emily?”

“Are any of us?”

“You think they got what they deserved, don’t you, Emily?”

“Of course not.”

“How did it make you feel when they got what was coming to them?”

“Are you a detective or psychiatrist?”

“A good detective is a little of both.”

“You know what they say about a Jack of all trades?”

I mask my vexation with a smile. From her background check, I know Emily is a fellow psychology graduate, receiving a first from Cambridge. As opposed to my two-one from the University of London. For the first time in a long while, I feel outclassed.

“We don’t have time to play games, Miss Hunter.” I abandon the first-name familiarity, prodding a percussive finger at the lurid photographs. “You won’t look at the evidence, Emily, because you are responsible.”

Emily’s harlequin eyes dart from the grotesque images, betraying the first glimmer of emotion. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“So you say, Emily.” I lean closer, scenting blood. “But even according to your questionable version of events, you still share the burden of responsibility.”

“Nobody was supposed to get hurt.” A fissure creeps into Emily’s voice.

“Yet they did, didn’t they, Emily. And I’d say ‘hurt’ is an incredibly benign way of describing murder.” I can feel the balance of power restoring.

Emily steers her gaze to the bloody gallery, her lithe shoulders quivering beneath the police station paper jumpsuit.

“Why don’t you tell us what really happened, Emily?”

Emily traps a sob with her hand. “It all just… spun out of control.”

“When did it spin out of control, Emily?”

A tear glides down Emily’s sharp cheekbone, falling onto the glossy print of a charred corpse stretched on a steel dissection table. Burnt beyond recognition of sex, or age, it stares back at her from scorched eye sockets, ivory teeth glinting from a gaping rictus trapped in a silent scream.

Emily takes a breath, summoning the words. “Where do I begin?”