The Perfect Divorce

The Perfect Divorce is a psychological thriller by Jeneva Rose. Originally published in 2025 by Blackstone Publishing, The Perfect Divorce is the second installment in Rose’s Perfect series, preceded by the 2020 novel The Perfect Marriage, and picks up 12 years after the first novel ends. Over a decade after Sarah Morgan’s husband Adam Morgan is put to death for the murder of his mistress, Kelly Summers, Sarah decides to divorce her second husband, Bob Miller. Not long after, she discovers that new evidence has come to light surrounding the Kelly Summers case. Afraid she’ll be implicated in Kelly’s murder, Sarah panics and decides to destroy Bob to protect herself. The novel is written from alternating first-person points of view and embraces the tropes of the thriller genre to fuel its high-stakes narrative arc. The Perfect Divorce explores themes including Trust and Betrayal in Intimate Relationships, The Impact of the Past on the Present, and The Tension Between Personal Identity and Public Image.

This guide refers to the 2025 Blackstone Publishing hardcover edition of the novel.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, substance use, addiction, physical and emotional abuse, sexual content, sexual violence, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm, child abuse, and death.

Plot Summary

Sarah Morgan attends a meeting with her husband, Bob Miller, and their respective lawyers, Jess and Brad. During the meeting, Sarah studies her husband and realizes that she never should have trusted him. She recently discovered that Bob cheated on her, and she immediately started divorce proceedings. With their lawyers present, Bob begs Sarah to forgive him. Sarah has no mercy; she threatens to take their daughter, Summer, away from Bob if he doesn’t accept the terms that she and Jess have drawn up.

Despite their enmity, Sarah and Bob decide to wait to tell Summer about their divorce. Bob has temporarily moved out of the house but continues coming over for dinner. One night, Sarah and Bob get into an argument while Sarah is cooking. She lashes out and cuts Bob with a knife. When he returns to the kitchen after washing the wound, he and Sarah stand agape in front of the television. News just broke that the former sheriff, Ryan Stevens, was arrested for a DUI. When they took a sample of his DNA and ran it through the system, they found a match implicating Stevens in the late Kelly Summers’s murder.

In the previous novel, Sarah and Bob killed Kelly together but have sworn each other to secrecy ever since. They framed Sarah’s late husband, Adam Morgan, and believed that no one would trace the crime back to them. However, in light of Stevens’s potential involvement in the incident, the police reopen the investigation. Stevens ran the investigation years before; if word gets out that he was mismanaging the operation, the police could turn their attention to Sarah and Bob.

Bob is terrified that Sarah will do something to hurt him now that their safety is at stake. Because Sarah murdered Kelly, he knows what she is capable of. He also fears that if she was willing to destroy Adam, she won’t hesitate to destroy him. Meanwhile, he’s terrified of losing Summer. Lost, alone, and afraid, he concocts a plan to destroy Sarah before she can destroy him.

Meanwhile, Sarah works hard to maintain her public image. She owns and operates the Morgan Foundation, an organization that helps formerly incarcerated people re-enter society. She devotes her time to the foundation, speaks calmly to the press about the reopened Kelly Summers case, and starts investing her time and energy in a new foundation client named Alejandro Perez.

One day, Bob gets a call from the sheriff’s office, calling him in for questioning. The police inform him that a woman named Stacy Howard has gone missing, and he is allegedly the last person she saw. Bob realizes that Stacy is the woman he had a drunken one-night affair with, but he swears that he didn’t do anything to hurt her. Then he realizes that Sarah could be behind Stacy’s disappearance. He tries to tell the police, but they don’t believe him.

Meanwhile, Sarah concocts a series of plans to hurt Bob. She kidnaps Stacy and locks her in the basement of their remote lake house. Then she “disappears” Bob’s hairdresser, Carissa Brooks, and Bob is the last person to see her before she goes missing, too. In reality, Sarah helps Carissa fake her death and skip town to evade her violent ex-boyfriend. However, Sarah pretends to be Carissa and makes the police believe that Bob hurt her. She sneaks into the lake house basement and tells a drugged Stacy that she is Carissa, and Bob captured them.

Weeks earlier, Bob hired Alejandro and planted him undercover at the foundation. Alejandro has since gotten close with Sarah (per Bob’s orders). Bob calls Alejandro, telling Alejandro that he wants him to kill Sarah as soon as possible.

Sarah and Alejandro have dinner together, and then they have sex. Afterward, Alejandro holds a gun to Sarah’s side and apologizes, telling her that he has to kill her. Sarah has suspected him the whole time and draws a gun on him, too. They make a deal: Sarah will pay Alejandro not to kill her, and they’ll stage her murder so that Bob thinks the job is done.

After Bob receives the fake photos of Sarah’s death, he reads the logs on the tracking device he put in Sarah’s car. He still wants to know what happened to Stacy. Then he realizes that Sarah was at the lake house earlier that day and races to the scene.

Stacy wakes up and discovers that Carissa is missing. She gropes around in the dark and finds a gun. Then she hears something coming from upstairs and creeps toward the sound. In the light, she sees Bob and shoots him.

When the police discover Bob’s body and learn what happened to Stacy, they tell Sarah the story. Sarah feigns shock and grief. In reality, Stacy did exactly what Sarah wanted her to do.

One year later, Sarah gives a television interview. She speaks about both Adam’s and Bob’s deaths and feigns sorrow. She also asserts that she won’t let her grief destroy her, as she is a naturally good and generous person.