An Ideal Wife »

Gemma Townley is the author of The Importance of Being Married, The Hopeless Romantic’s Handbook, Learning Curves, Little White Lies, and When in Rome. She lives in London with her husband and son.

How to ruin a perfectly good marriage: become an Ideal Wife!
 
Married to the man she loves—sweet, sexy Max—Jessica Wild-Wainwright is blissfully happy . . . except for one tiny little problem: She never confessed to an (almost) tryst with Max’s biggest rival right before their wedding. Eaten up with guilt and facing down threats of exposure, Jessica decides to give Max what he clearly still lacks: the Ideal Wife. With the help of her friends, she will become perfect in every way: doting, devoted, domestic—everything Max deserves.

However, the path to perfection is fraught with peril, from culinary chaos to a boudoir disaster that puts Max in the hospital with a broken leg and a sexy nurse (who is certainly Ideal in every way that Jessica is not). When Jessica rallies to run Max’s company—and is met with overt hostility by an obsessive co-worker and by an auditor determined to uncover everyone’s secrets, things become decidedly less than Ideal. Toss in a semiretired Russian stripper turned stay-at-home mom and strange men watching her apartment, and Jessica fears Project Ideal Wife has backfired miserably. Can a less than perfect wife save the day?

Publishers Weekly

Townley’s latest novel based on an Oscar Wilde play (The Importance of Being Married) is her most plausible and engaging yet. Series heroine Jessica Wild has a cool £4 million in the bank, but she and husband, Max Wainwright, still work hard running his ad agency. Tough times have hit, and Max is in desperate need of a big new account, specifically that of Chester Rydall, Jessica’s would-be stepfather, who happens to run a very large bank. When Chester decides to run an ethics audit of his employees as a PR stunt, Max subjects his company to the same “Ideal Company” ploy. Meanwhile, Jess toils at becoming the ideal wife, to generally unpleasant results, such as landing Max in the hospital with a broken leg and a flirty nurse. A blitz of subplots and a colorful assortment of supporting characters help push things along. Even if this suffers from the same sorts of overblown misunderstandings and coincidences that are as much a staple of the genre as designer clothes, it’s still a delight, and Jess has finally achieved lovable heroine status. (July)