Kimberly McCreight discusses deadly love triangles in her new book "Someone Else's Husband"
Please consider joining our Facebook group by CLICKING HERE.
Find out more about the books below.
Listen to The Club Calvi Podcast by CLICKING HERE
Mary Calvi welcomed author Kimberly McCreight back to Club Calvi to talk about her new book "Someone Else's Husband." McCreight's previous mystery, "Like Mother, Like Daughter," was voted a Club Calvi Readers' Choice in 2024. You can listen to their entire conversation on The Club Calvi Podcast.
"Someone Else's Husband" combines the stories of a compelling and fatal climb up one of the tallest mountains in the world with a deadly love triangle.
Mary asked McCreight about that climb up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. It's one of the "seven summits," the highest mountains on each of the world's seven continents.
"It's an expedition climb, meaning it takes several days, nine days usually, though you can do it a bit shorter," McCreight explained. "You camp, and you move from camp to camp, and you progress. It's a climb that I'm famliar with because I've done it myself. So that was a little bit of the genesis of the book."
Mary remarked that there was no one better than McCreight to tell this story and asked her what it was like to climb Kilimanjaro.
"It was really life changing," McCreight said. "Doing this climb was a part of my own 'Eat Pray Love' journey after getting divorced. It was the first really big trip that I took alone. When I got there, the big surprise for me was that it wasn't couples. I was the only woman. And because of the moment it was in my life, I was going from being a wife, and being a wife for 20 years, to suddenly being the single lady on the trip, I was really struck by the notion that, just so quickly, I was the same person, but I had just become a completely different person in the eyes of the world. It was within that that the seed for the book was planted."
Mary remarked that McCreight's books are character driven. Two women are at the center of the plot of "Someone Else's Husband." Gretchen lives with her husband Richard on Park Avenue. Frankie, an artist in New York City, meets Richard on the KilImanjaro climb. Frankie is the only woman on the book's climb. Mary asked McCreight if Frankie's character was the genesis of creating the book.
"I think it really started with the idea of the roles of women," McCreight answered. "The idea that you are either the wife or the other woman and that so often times they are really stereotypical and narrow. Those are the choices we are given. One is villianized and one is made to look foolish. I really wanted to write a book where that wasn't true."
Mary said she could not have imagined the ending when she started reading the book, asking herself who committed the murder and was there a murder. She asked McCreight about her writing process.
"I know the ending in the sense of I know who didn't do it," McCreight explained. "There are predictable ways that can happen and I've usually ruled those out. I know that my ending is going to tie into the thematics. I know what my book is about in a broader sense. If I stay focused on that as the end point, the details of exactly who done it and how we will get there tend to take care of themselves."
Club Calvi books may contain adult themes.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Someone Else's Husband" by Kimberly McCreight
From the publisher: Gretchen Falk, a Park Avenue sophisticate born into great wealth and blessed with a storybook marriage, knows she lives a charmed life, and she's not about to risk losing any part of it. That's why she tried to convince Richard, her devoted husband and the father to their three children, not to join his old college friends on an expedition to the imposing peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. Little did she know that the beautiful artist climbing alongside him might prove the far greater danger.
Frankie Callahan's dream of artistic success is within reach, with her career-making exhibition at a celebrated New York gallery only weeks away. If all goes well, the show will leave her financially independent, free of the tainted money that ties her to a past—and a man—she's desperate to escape. To mark this new beginning, she is going to climb Kilimanjaro. But when she learns she's the sole female accompanying a group of male friends, Frankie realizes that nothing about the trip will be as she expected. She certainly hasn't counted on meeting anyone like the very charismatic, very rich, very married Richard Falk. By the time they descend—with one fewer in their group than when they began—they have lost more than they ever could have imagined.
Now, less than two weeks after their return to New York, Frankie's East Village loft is a blood-soaked crime scene, and Richard has been charged with her murder. It falls to Gretchen to figure how the life she so carefully constructed could have imploded so completely. There are only two things she knows for sure: she's the only woman Richard has ever loved, and he would never hurt anyone.
Kimberly McCreight lives in Brooklyn.
"Someone Else's Husband" by Kimberly McCreight (ThriftBooks) $23
Excerpt: "Someone Else's Husband" by Kimberly McCreight
The summit was everything I'd hoped for and yet nothing like I'd imagined—vast and snowcapped and endlessly flat. Deserted, too, but for the sign marking it as the highest point in all of Africa, one of the highest in the world. I started crying when I saw it in the distance. We were so high that it felt like you could reach up and touch the cerulean sky.
We'd made it. I had made it.
It had been touch-and-go up until the very end. The last stretch of climbing was way worse than I'd expected. Short, like Bakari had said. Only about an hour. And this time we could see the real end—there would be no more false summits. But something about the wide-open topography and the accumulated exhaustion meant that the more we hiked, the farther away the last ridge seemed. The pitch was nearly vertical but without rocks to grab. The freezing wind had also picked up again, tearing at the bits of exposed skin around our eyes.
I sucked down three gel packets as we went, waiting and waiting for the usual sugar high. But my body was so spent, I felt nothing.
And then, all at once, we were there. The final few steps, the last ridge just a low line of stones. Then a plane of white under a brilliant, cloudless blue sky. I bent over for a moment, head throbbing as the tears came. A flood of so many emotions at the exact same moment. Joy. Relief. Delight. Triumph.
But also a strange sort of grief. It was time to say goodbye to the broken girl I'd been carrying all these years, the girl with a brave, open heart. Too open. It was time to lay her down. To let her be. I knew it, and I was ready. But long-overdue closure is also a kind of loss. You need to recalibrate your equilibrium in its wake.
We paused briefly for group photos at the sign marking the summit and spent a few more moments taking it all in. I cried the whole time. Silently. But deeply. I wasn't the only one.
We didn't linger. I was feeling better, and I said as much. But Bakari was convinced we shouldn't press our luck. Apparently, a woman with another group earlier in the season had been happily snapping photos at the summit when she suddenly crashed. And she'd been fine the entire climb.
"Did she recover?" I asked after Bakari recounted the story to get us moving along.
Bakari shook his head. "No, she did not."
Sure enough, I started backsliding on the way back down. My vision blurred, and the tingling returned to my fingertips. I felt like a giant marionette, all jutting knees and thrusting elbows, and I had to focus hard just to keep my body in proper walking alignment.
Bakari took up the front, followed by Scotty, then Richard, me, Van, and Brooks. Kito, as always, was bringing up the rear. We stayed mostly quiet on the descent, except for the usual warnings: "Watch," "Left," "Heads up," in spots where there was a loose rock or where the sand was especially deep.
Kilimanjaro was as wide as a ski slope on the back side, the terrain now deep sand. Every fifth or sixth step you'd slide, sometimes wrenching your back or twisting an ankle. We were all complaining. After about an hour, we moved out of the sand to the side of the trail, where the footing was easier. We weren't on the rocky edge; it was nowhere near as perilous as the Western Breach. Yet Bakari warned us several times to watch our step. Meanwhile, the light turned a magic gold as the sun sank. And despite everything, a sense of peace flooded me. I couldn't stop smiling.
"Everything you were hoping for?" Richard asked. He glanced back at me over his shoulder.
"One thousand percent," I said.
Excerpted from Someone Else's Husband by Kimberly McCreight. Copyright © 2026 by Kimberly McCreight. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.