'A Reliable Wife' by Robert Goolrick, 6/2/10

Robert Goolrick’s is a story of love and betrayal. Set in the early 1900’s, the story begins with a man, Ralph Truitt, a lonely and wealth man in Wisconsin who has placed a personal ad looking for ‘a reliable wife.’ Someone who could sit with him at dinner and he could talk to. He is waiting at the train station to pick up the woman he has chosen from the ad responses who has described herself as ‘a simple, honest woman.'

When this woman, Catherine Land, steps off the train, Truitt immediately notices that she is not the woman whose picture he has in his pocket. He almost puts her back on the train, but since the train isn’t leaving that night he takes her to his home in the country for the night. It is the beginning of winter and the snow is starting to fall. On their way, there is an accident with the carriage and Truitt is injured. Catherine helps heal him back to consciousness and heath and in the course of doing so Truitt has grown to respect her.

They do get married. Catherine may have advertised that she is ‘a simple, honest woman’, but that anything but true. Her plan always was to wed Truitt and slowly kill him with arsenic for his money.
Truitt, on the other hand, has a different plan in mind. He requests that she go to St Louis and bring back is son that ran away 12 years ago. She does as she is requested to do and the issues that result are nothing if not intriguing.

Throughout the Wisconsin winter, where the solitude and loneliness are described in riveting detail, you learn that there is more to love and marriage that money. The story was great. Although I hadn’t had a chance to read for several months, I finished this book in two days. The ending was a complete shocker, not what I was expecting at all.