Since Gillian Flynn’s 2012 sensation Gone Girl, domestic noir has become one of the most recognizable strands of contemporary crime fiction. Coined by novelist Julia Crouch in 2013, the term denotes a subgenre of crime fiction that focuses on violence against women emerging from within the supposedly safe spaces of marriage, family, the workplace, and friendship. This focus reflects the reality that women are much more likely to be harmed by someone they know than by a stranger. Crouch explains that domestic noir takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants” (Crouch, Julia. “Genre Bender.” JuliaCrouch.co.uk, 25 Aug. 2013).

The genre can be understood as a reaction to the portrayal of women as victims in more traditional crime novels and thrillers. For decades, crime fiction by mostly male authors centered on female victims in which the inciting incident was the discovery of a dead woman’s body by a male detective, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1922 short story “The Problem of Thor Bridge” and Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1943). Domestic noir shifts the terrain of the crime thriller from the urban street—typically otherized and portrayed as a threatening space—to the seemingly safe confines of the home. At the same time, it reverses the objectification of women as victims, instead centering women as complex and morally ambiguous protagonists. Just as Gone Girl protagonist Amy Dunne takes the media frenzy surrounding her disappearance and inverts it for her vengeance, the domestic noir genre, with predominantly female authorship, flips the perverse fascination with dead women on its head and explores the way women see and experience the world differently than men. These novels give agency to characters who might otherwise be reduced to victims or corpses.

Credited with the explosion of books with “girl” in the title, such as Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (2015), JP Delaney’s The Girl Before (2017), and Robert Bryndza’s The Girl in the Ice (2016), domestic noir dominated bestseller lists throughout the 2010s. Publishers recognized an audience for stories centered on women’s perspectives, particularly narratives that explore the dark undercurrents of “safe” suburban lives. Yet some critics question the genre for its potential to silence or diminish female voices even as it amplifies them. Writing in Literary Hub in 2016, novelist Robin Wasserman notes that many of these titular “girls” are in fact adult women and that calling them girls can be perceived as infantilizing. She also notes, however, that the term can be a way of pushing back against the loss of individual identity some women experience in the roles of wife and mother:

To be called “just a girl” may be diminishment, but to call yourself “still a girl,” can be empowerment, laying claim to the unencumbered liberties of youth. As Gloria Steinem likes to remind us, women lose power as they age. The persistence of girlhood can be a battle cry. (Wasserman, Robin. “What Does it Mean When We Call Women Girls?” Literary Hub. 18 May 2016).

At its best, domestic noir offers sophisticated explorations of power, gender, and the performance of femininity in contemporary society. The unreliable female narrator, a genre trademark, becomes a commentary on how women’s voices are routinely dismissed or disbelieved.

Alice Feeney’s My Husband’s Wife represents a recent evolution within the genre. Sergeant Carter introduces elements of hardboiled detective fiction, and the shifting first-person perspectives give it a psychological thriller feel. Feeney employs the usual domestic noir devices, such as the “stolen life” trope, unreliable narrators, fragmented timelines, and characters who exist in moral gray zones, which keep the reader questioning everything, but she also introduces elements of mystery and even science fiction with the Thanatos storyline (Still, Marie. “The Rise of Domestic Noir: A Decade After Gone Girl.” CrimeReads, 10 Mar. 2023).