As Husbands Go . . . well, the husband who is at the center of this novel – went. As in, murdered, in a scenario which initially put this reader in mind of Eliot Spitzer, former New York governor, except this time it’s not a politician. Dr. Jonah Gersten, who to all appearances had been a very successful Park Avenue plastic surgeon, devoted husband to Susie, and proud father of four-year-old triplets, has been found stabbed to death in a call girl’s Manhattan apartment. On the night he first fails to return home, Susie had been thinking to herself: “Jonah and I have some lucky star shining down on us.” That mindset is soon dispelled when, the following morning, the police are at her door to give her the news.
Theirs was an idyllic relationship, having met when Jonah was a senior at Yale, quickly fell in love and married. Though she feels others may fail to see how she had “score[d] a privileged-attractive-charming-gifted-successful Yale doctor,” Susie would have sworn by all that was holy that Jonah had never been unfaithful to her, and refuses to believe that he was patronizing a prostitute. She is determined to find out the truth, even if it undermines the case against the woman who everyone else believes is guilty of the murder. Jonah’s s parents and brother believe Susie is in denial, if not completely delusional, which seems to be the opinion of the police and the chief of the DA’s Homicide Bureau as well.
Susie’s only allies are her business partner, Andrea, and Grandma Ethel, the grandmother she had met for the first time not long after she and Jonah had married. The portrait drawn by the author of Ethel Nachman O’Shea, 79 years old, for 25 years the host of “Talk of Miami” and presently in a lesbian relationship with a much younger civil liberties attorney known as Sparky, is an indelible one, as are many of the other characters who provide the backdrop to this novel.
I have enjoyed Susan Isaacs’ writing since reading her first novel, “Compromising Positions,” in 1978. Her finely honed sense of humor and irony is evident throughout, and the murder mystery and the relationships among the various Gersten/Rabinowitz family members satisfying, and the novel is recommended.
