The Perfect Divorce

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, emotional abuse, and death.

The Perfect Divorce is a psychological thriller or suspense novel. Books categorizable as psychological thrillers have many overlaps with mystery novels. Such stories always begin with a primary mystery, which often involves a murder, disappearance, robbery, heist, or other sensational crime. The investigation of this crime leads the primary cast of characters on either a quest for the truth or a mad dash to escape culpability. The overarching plot line focuses on solving the primary mystery and either implicating or absolving certain characters.

Another key facet of the psychological thriller novel is its reliance on genre conventions, which include plot twists and turns, unreliable narrators, moral ambiguity, complex character studies, and tropes like the intelligent “psychopath.” These conventions are often used to fuel the thriller novel’s primary mystery, heighten the narrative stakes, intensify the narrative atmosphere, and immerse the reader in the horrors of the narrative world.

Jeneva Rose relies on thriller tropes throughout The Perfect Divorce. None of the first-person narrators are entirely reliable because they all cast blame on each other.