SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Jeneva Rose‘s novels “The Perfect Marriage” and “The Perfect Divorce.”
Sarah Morgan has gotten away with it again: Jeneva Rose’s “The Perfect Divorce,” the sequel to 2017’s “The Perfect Marriage,” has hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list on both the hardcover and combined print/ebook lists following its April 15 release.
Readers of the first book have been clamoring for a sequel since the story of attorney Sarah Morgan became an obsession for book communities on Instagram and TikTok during the pandemic. But with a twist so big — Sarah being the killer of her adulterous husband Adam’s mistress, Kelly Summers, and the one who set him up for the murder while simultaneously defending him tooth and nail in court — where was Rose to go after that?
“That’s what probably took me the longest to figure out,” Rose told Variety. “I knew everyone was going to be on to Sarah, all the readers from ‘The Perfect Marriage,’ they’re gonna be like, ‘What is she doing, and why is she doing it? And I know she’s gonna come out on top.’ So the time balance was very interesting, how I had to weave these storylines.”
“The Perfect Divorce” catches up with Sarah and her new husband Bob (who helped her pull off the murder/frame job in the first book) raising their daughter, Summer, 10 years after the Kelly Summers. Now, Sarah is dealing with another cheating husband — but this one knows how she operates.
“The more people Sarah takes out, the more risks she has of getting caught, which then would ultimately affect her daughter,” Rose said. “So she was much more calculated with this as to what she was going to do and why she was going to do it. And playing this game with Bob, she needed to do things differently than what she did in the first book, because Bob knows what she does, so she couldn’t do the same thing where she just frames Bob for murder. It had to be something different in order to also be one step ahead of Bob.”
Read more below from Variety‘s interview with Rose about “The Perfect Divorce,” ongoing plans for “The Perfect Marriage” movie, and what she’s working on for a third book in the Sarah Morgan saga.
“The Perfect Marriage” came out in 2017 and blew up on TikTok during the pandemic. At what point did you decide to write a sequel?
I had an idea for a sequel, or at least how the story could continue, when I finished writing “The Perfect Marriage” back in 2017 but I didn’t know if it would ever warrant a sequel, because obviously the sales have to be there for a publisher to get behind it. And the sales were there in 2022-2023, but then I waited until I knew I had a solid idea in terms of there really being a reason how the plot could continue — the opening of the Kelly Summers case, and how the story could continue, but I needed to be sure that there was enough there for the characters. Why are their stories continuing? And then, obviously, with “The Perfect Marriage,” with readers expecting these jaw-dropping twists, I also wanted to ensure I had the twists and the reveals that would live up to the original, so I would get stuck in kind of a sequel curse, as they call it. So once I had those, and I felt like I would be very proud of the book I was going to write, and I had the idea, that’s when I decided. That was in early 2024/late 2023 when I came up with it. And I was like, “OK, I’m ready to write this, and I will pitch it to my publisher.”
How did you decide to handle the POVs in this one after the big reveal at the end of “Marriage”? How you would approach Sarah, knowing readers would now be on the lookout for her as an unreliable narrator and a killer?
With this one, I wanted to add more than just the back and forth of the husband and the wife POV. So there’s also Sheriff Hudson, who is Deputy Hudson in the first book. And then there’s an unknown narrator and Bob, who’s the new husband. And with Sarah, I knew there was going to be this fine line. She is a different person in the sense that she’s a mother. Her interests are all for her daughter’s sake, not so much for her, it’s her daughter first. But in this one, I’m going to peel back the layers and allow the readers to get closer to her, in terms of her internal thoughts, but not completely, because she still does compartmentalize, and she thinks that she’s always doing the wrong things, I guess, for the right reasons. That’s kind of her moral compass.
Do you feel like, had Bob never cheated on her, they would have just stayed together, and they’d still be together?
I would say so. I think that Sarah has her code that she operates on, and as long as someone doesn’t wrong her, then I think that they would have continued. Regardless if it was an accident or a mistake or a one time thing for her, it’s like once the trust is broken, it’s broken, and you can’t have that person in your life anymore, because she has too much at stake.
How did Sarah decide not to also kill Stacy when trying to set up and take out Bob, compared to what she did in the first book with killing Kelly and framing Adam for her murder?
With the first book, there was really that element of Bob wanting Kelly gone, because that was his vegetable plot. And so Sarah was like, “You know what? That’s fine.” And this woman Kelly, Sarah knew she was wrong. Whereas in this situation, yes, this woman Stacy, her M.O. is to go after men, sleep with them, blackmail them, make sure she knows that they’re married. But for Sarah, it was like, “I don’t need to have more loose ends. I don’t need to have these casualties. Really, it’s Bob’s mistake, and Bob has to own up for it. And it’s not the woman’s responsibility to be faithful the part of the man who was married. It’s the man’s responsibility.” I think she very much recognized that. And there wasn’t someone else that she was partnered with trying to have interference with what they were going to do, and have their own reasons for revenge.
With the new character of Alejandro, what you were trying to express there, especially given he is part of this program run by Sarah to reform formerly imprisoned people, but turns out not to be reformed at all and is instead tasked by Bob with watching — and then later attempting to kill Sarah?
Sarah knew early on, and that’s why she took a liking to him, because he was really not a part of this program, and this was a plant by Bob, and that’s why in the end she says, “Bob’s never done a nomination at all.” So it was her keeping him close to figure out what Bob was up to, and then also figure out if she needs to either get rid of him or bring him in on her side. So if this would have been a real, actual, nominated person for this program, she would have treated it like a person that could be on the straight and narrow and get there with the right circumstances and the right opportunities. But because of that, it wasn’t, and that’s why she invites him to work on the back deck in her house, invites him over for dinner, it’s all just to keep them close.
When writing “The Perfect Marriage,” did you know that Kelly was not responsible for Bob’s brother’s murder, or is that something you started to work through when you were writing “Divorce”?
I did know that, and that’s why, in “The Perfect Marriage,” Kelly becomes a character where she’s in these situations, and it’s a “he said, she said” type thing, where she’s accused Scott of abuse, and he’s claiming he didn’t, so you don’t know. But I always thought that she was a person that was accused of a murder and she did not commit it. And what would that do to your mental state if you truly were a victim and stricken with this grief of losing your partner, and then everyone thinks you murdered them, wouldn’t you always want someone to believe that you are vulnerable? And that’s kind of how it’s snowballed for her. It wasn’t explained, you don’t get her point of view, but that’s how I always envisioned her — that she was not responsible, and therefore she just had this grief that no one cared about, that she could never work through. She was never seen as anything other than the person responsible for it, and she actually had to leave town because of that. And what would that do to your mental state?
Speaking of Kelly’s ex Scott, based on where you leave off at the end of “The Perfect Divorce,” what can you tease about what’s going on with him, and if anyone’s gonna catch up to him in a future book?
I have an idea for a third book to make it a trilogy. And there are, just like in “The Perfect Marriage,” there were loose ends, and there are loose ends here. We have Stacy escaping the basement and having been close to Sarah, and even though Sarah threw her voice, would Stacy ever recognize that voice again, when Sarah’s doing her TV interviews? Or what about Scott, when he finds out the person that killed Kelly is still alive? And so there are still some loose threads, not everything being tied up in a bow, that could come back in a third.
What do you call a third book, after “The Perfect Marriage” and “The Perfect Divorce”?
I don’t know. I haven’t thought of that yet. She’s not going to remarry again. But I don’t know: “The Perfect Marriage,” “The Perfect Divorce” — “The Perfect Engagement”? She gets engaged but she’s never going to get married, to Alejandro or something? I don’t know, I’ll have to think on that one!
A film adaptation of “The Perfect Marriage” has been in development since October 2022 with director Sigal Avin, screenwriter William Broyles and producer Patrick Wachsberger. What is the current status of “The Perfect Marriage” movie and have the rights for the sequel been optioned for a film as well?
With “The Perfect Marriage” film, there is a director attached and a screenwriter, and I was supposed to see a script in March, and it’s April, and I haven’t seen one yet. So it’s pending, I guess. And then if the production company that optioned it does make “The Perfect Marriage” into a film, then they would get the sequel rights from my perspective.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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