Review of Anatomy of an Alibi by Ashley Elston

Anatomy of an Alibi pits privileged greed against savvy morally gray characters, and the women caught in the middle are left sorting out the truth. The bad guys are truly bad, and outsiders pay the price when those in power preserve outward appearances at any cost.

I loved Ashley Elston's mystery First Lie Wins (it was on my December favorites list; it was one of my Bossy Fiction Ideas for Your Holiday Gift List; and it was on my recent list of Four-Star Mysteries I Loved Reading Last Year).

So my hopes for Elston's recently published Anatomy of an Alibi were sky-high.

Camille Bayliss is living a charmed life of wealth, prestige, beauty, and privilege in Louisiana, married to a handsome hotshot lawyer, Ben.

Aubrey Price, a local bartender, was orphaned as a young woman when her parents were killed in a hit-and-run car accident, and she's been struggling and bending the rules to get by ever since.

The two women become unlikely partners in sniffing out the truth about Camille's husband Ben's secrets. Aubrey takes Camille's place for twelve hours, and Camille attempts to spy on Ben to figure out what's going on. But it turns out that Ben is fully entrenched in situations more far-reaching than Camille could have imagined, and Aubrey's friends-like-family are drawn into the mess as well. Soon the women are facing a death, difficult truths, and a complicated web of destruction as their clever plan sets into motion a course of events will change each of them forever. Only one of the women has an alibi, and the security of both of their precarious lives is on the line.

I enjoyed the morally gray characters--friends of Aubrey's--and the way they worked their savvy systems for their own benefit and to support each other. Yet they didn't feel like the "bad guys"; the greedy, privileged characters who manipulated the law and police investigations are the ones behaving despicably while seeming outwardly upstanding and respectable.

I was obsessed with the premise of Elston's First Lie Wins (con woman possibly being double-crossed), and I enjoyed this mystery but wasn't quite as hooked by the setup, story, or characters. The ending of Anatomy of an Alibi introduces complications for the future of the surviving characters and calls into question yet another crime and alibi, which was entertaining.

I listened to Anatomy of an Alibi as an audiobook courtesy of Libro.fm and Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.

More Mystery Love

I recently published Greedy Reading Lists of favorite mystery reads: Six Four-Star Mysteries I Loved Reading Last Year and Six More Mysteries I Loved Reading Last Year. And you can find my favorite mystery reads from the year before here.