49 pages • 1-hour read
Jeneva RoseA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and death.
Sarah lets Eleanor in, and she immediately confronts Sarah about the reopened Summers case and her plans to file a wrongful death suit. She’s furious that the police are now speculating that Ryan was seeing Kelly, implying that he might have been involved in Adam’s messy case.
Sarah stays calm, determined not to get upset. Summer comes through on her way out to see a friend. After Summer is gone, Eleanor gives Sarah defamation paperwork before leaving—she’s suing Sarah for defamation because Sarah questioned Eleanor’s mental stability in her television interview, which Eleanor thinks will complicate her wrongful death suit.
Bob is walking to the barbershop when his lawyer Brad calls about Stacy’s case. Bob informs him of his suspicion that Sarah hired Stacy to sleep with him. He insists that Brad doesn’t really know Sarah. He ends the call when he arrives at Cuts by Carissa. During the haircut and shave, Bob notices that Carissa seems jumpy. Then she knicks his neck with the blade. She suggests giving him the haircut on the house.
While she’s at work, Sarah calls her lawyer Jess. She wants to go after Bob in the divorce before he can go after her. Afterward, she texts Alejandro about meeting up. Then two police officers stop by to question her.
Marcus and Pam tell Sarah about Ryan’s murder and question her. Sarah barely reacts, unsurprised that someone wanted him dead. They also ask her about her whereabouts on the night of Kelly’s murder and about her and Bob’s divorce. Marcus gets a call on his police radio that interrupts the interrogation. He is wanted at a salon downtown. After he and Pam leave, they discuss Sarah’s interview, curious as to why she seemed unaffected by Ryan’s death.
Bob meets with his boss Kent, who confronts him for letting his personal life distract him from his work. The conversation makes Bob realize that Kent told Sarah about Stacy. Kent doesn’t deny it, insisting that he was protecting Sarah (who was formerly a partner there with them) by informing her of Bob’s infidelity. He suspends Bob and tells him to use the time off to pull himself back together.
Marcus and Pam report to Cuts by Carissa. The salon is covered in blood and hair, but Carissa’s body isn’t there. They plan to file a missing person’s report, as they’ve determined that the blood is Carissa’s. They think her case might be related to Stacy’s and Stevens’s cases.
Sarah and Bob have dinner with Summer and tell her about the divorce. Sarah tries to explain that they can’t be together anymore but still love her. Upset, Summer storms out. Sarah accuses Bob of creating the mess by cheating on her. Bob threatens to hurt Sarah if she doesn’t free Stacy. Watching Bob eat, Sarah wishes she’d killed him.
The unknown woman wakes up in the dark to the sound of whimpering and crying. She realizes another woman is in the basement with her. The two victims introduce themselves as Stacy and Carissa.
Bob returns to the sheriff’s office for questioning in the Carissa case. He tells them about his haircut but swears nothing strange happened. When he learns that she’s gone missing, he admits that Carissa seemed anxious and cut his neck by accident. The police speculate about Carissa’s whereabouts. Her abusive ex-boyfriend George had just gotten out of prison, and they wonder if he was after her.
Then they pivot the interrogation back to Stacy. They show Bob a text exchange between himself and Stacy in which Stacy tried to extort Bob. They ask if he hurt Stacy to get revenge and if he did the same to Carissa when she nicked him. Bob denies the claims and leaves to talk to Brad.
Bob tells Brad he thinks Sarah is framing him. He reveals the truth about Kelly’s murder: Sarah killed her. He and Sarah planned the murder because she was angry that Adam cheated on her, and he was angry that Kelly killed Greg. He then says he has evidence that can prove the crime.
Marcus and Pam study Stacy’s and Carissa’s missing photos and try to make sense of their fates. They speculate about Carissa’s ex-boyfriend and Stacy’s extortion history. Finally, they bring George in for questioning; He admits that he and Carissa were in contact but insists he didn’t hurt her. He won’t say anything else without a lawyer.
Sarah presses through the reporters on her way into work. Inside, she talks to Anne about the Kelly Summers case and Stevens’s murder. Anne is sympathetic to Sarah’s situation, and Sarah plays along.
Marcus returns and starts questioning Sarah about Carissa and George; he says that the foundation “helped Carissa get a protective order” against George (201). Sarah feigns shock and demands that the police find George immediately. After Marcus leaves, Sarah and Alejandro make plans to have dinner at Sarah’s.
Bob brings Brad the knife that Sarah used to kill Kelly. He explains that Sarah gave it to him to dispose of, but he’s held onto it all these years just in case he ever needed something on Sarah. Brad promises to handle the evidence appropriately and warns Bob not to go near Sarah or Summer until the case is resolved.
Afterward, Bob unearths a burner phone from his car and texts Alejandro about meeting up at a hotel the next morning. He turns off the phone, relieved that he’ll finally be able to end Sarah.
In these chapters, the author incorporates another series of genre conventions and tropes to complicate the novel’s central mysteries. True to suspense novels and psychological thrillers, The Perfect Divorce embraces narrative twists and turns (or plot twists), psychological manipulation, the descent into “madness,” and the unreliable narrator. These tropes function in service of the novel’s overarching plot line and its thematic explorations. The more plot twists that the characters encounter, the less they can trust each other. The less they trust each other, the more they try to manipulate one another for their own gain. In turn, each of the characters becomes less and less convinced of what is true and what is real. As a result, the primary first-person narrators appear less reliable. Rose’s incorporation of these tropes heightens the significance of exploring Sarah, Bob, and Marcus’s independent storylines as a way of understanding the whole story.
Sarah, Bob, and Marcus’s braided narratives all also examine The Tension Between Private Identity and Public Image. Each of the primary characters has a distinct set of character traits that make them who they are. However, the way that Sarah, Bob, and Marcus depict their experiences and tell their accounts on the page often conflicts with how they present themselves to others. The interaction of their three first-person narratives creates formal tension and captures the difficulties of trying to form intimate connections without trust or understanding, connecting to the theme of Trust and Betrayal in Intimate Relationships. For example, When Adam’s late mother Eleanor comes to see Sarah, Sarah’s internal monologue conflicts with her outward presentation. While she privately acknowledges that she didn’t expect Eleanor “to show up at [her] doorstep” because she “assumed she was too old to make the trip” (239), Sarah shows no signs of surprise in their interaction. She leans back in her chair, affecting a relaxed posture that belies her internal turmoil over seeing Eleanor again. She has ulterior motives behind reopening the Kelly Summers case, but she wants Eleanor to believe otherwise. This scene shows how skilled Sarah is at manipulating her public image to control others’ perceptions of her.
Sarah’s behavior also complicates Bob’s and Marcus’s impressions of her. In Bob’s chapters, he is convinced that Sarah is out to get him and is actively setting him up, even though Sarah shows few signs of violence toward him; meanwhile, in his chapters, Marcus focuses his investigation on Bob because he doubts someone like Sarah could have committed and gotten away with so many crimes. Each of the characters has a distinct way of seeing themselves that affects their perspective on one another’s motives and behaviors. Because their individual versions of truth rarely align, the reality of the characters’ overarching world feels more and more obscured. These dynamics suggest that truth is subjective, dependent on each individual’s point of view; furthermore, the way that the individual performs her identity has the power to shape her acquaintances’ understandings of reality.
Carissa’s disappearance is another plot twist that augments the narrative tension and heightens the characters’ internal states, particularly Bob’s. Marcus and Pam immediately implicate him in her case, and this legal situation augments Bob’s internal unrest and drives him to increasingly impulsive and volatile actions. Bob feels as if he is under attack; as a result, he acts out to protect himself. At the same time, Bob’s behavior compels the other characters to doubt his motives and to mistrust him. This interaction between Bob’s external stimuli and internal reactions is especially apparent when the police interrogate him in Chapter 34. He knows that the officers are “trying to lead [him] down a path of speculation” and tries to adopt Sarah’s cool, collected exterior to convince them otherwise (184). However, as soon as he leaves the sheriff’s office, Bob calls Brad, outs Sarah for murder, and brings Brad the murder weapon. He then uses a burner phone to contact a yet unidentified contact about a mysterious meet-up. His behaviors show how one mystery (Carissa’s disappearance in this case) torments him and inspires him to take extreme actions in other areas of his life.



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