Secrets of a Marine’s Wife: A True Story of Marriage, Obsession, and Murder

Bestseller Hogan (The Stranger She Loved: A Mormon Doctor, His Beautiful Wife, and an Almost Perfect Murder) delivers another page-turner, though her methods, which include reconstructed conversations and vague sourcing, will give some readers pause. In 2014, 19-year-old Erin Corwin, the pregnant wife of Marine corporal Jon Corwin, disappeared from her home in the military town of Twentynine Palms, Calif. During the eight-week search for her, the police learned that she was having an affair with a married neighbor, Marine corporal Chris Lee. Circumstantial evidence against Chris began to accumulate, including his initial lies about the nature of his relationship with Erin and his admission that he had researched how to dispose of a body. After Erin’s badly decomposed remains were found in a mine shaft in the Mojave Desert, Chris was charged with first-degree murder and convicted following a trial in which he claimed that he killed Erin in a blind rage after she confessed to sexually abusing his six-year-old daughter. Hogan’s penchant for foreboding chapter endings (“No one could know how truly disturbed Chris had become”) and heavy-handed prose will put off some. Hogan supplies no footnotes or endnotes for quotes, and admits in an author note: “Conversations portrayed in the book have been reconstructed.” Still, this sad, essentially tragic story will move many. Agent: Sharlene Martin, Martin Literary Management. (Feb.)