Books Like The Last Mrs. Parrish: 9 Perfect-Wife Thrillers (2026)

The author Liv Constantine is two people. According to the sisters’ own Publishers Weekly essay, Lynne and Valerie Constantine wrote The Last Mrs. Parrish while living hundreds of miles apart and split the book down the middle: Valerie wrote Amber, the scheming outsider, and Lynne wrote Daphne, the socialite with the fairy-tale marriage. They FaceTimed every afternoon around 4 or 5, and they had one rule between them: veto power. If either sister couldn’t stomach a scene, it was gone.

I get Amber. I mean the standing-outside-the-mansion-with-your-nose-against-the-glass part (the felony parts, less so). I grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut, where they filmed parts of Stepford Wives, and a few towns over from the one that inspired the book. According to the New England Historical Society, New Canaan has the highest per capita income in the wealthiest county in the wealthiest state in the union, and I lived there as one of the townies. Here is how I put it in my memoir Where to Nest:

“You live in an apartment?” one of my rich friends once asked, crinkling her nose, after giving me a ride from our high school in her BMW SUV. Friends were never invited over to my house because while they had life-size Barbies, the newest PlayStation games, and pet horses, I had the usual stuff: a handful of regular-size, secondhand Barbies, a Tamagotchi, and a pet snapping turtle, Snappy, that I’d caught in the local river and fed worms in my bathtub. Playdates felt like a trip to a Disney castle. I’d wander into a friend’s home and admire their spiral staircase, primary bedroom bathroom with four sinks (why would you even need this?), walk-in closet, or private movie theater.

“Don’t put your elbows on the table,” my step-grandfather would scold me at Thanksgiving dinner. “Wealthy people have a code of manners, and to be one of them, you have to show you know their rules.”

Where to Nest, Chapter 1

That is Amber Patterson’s entire business plan, and I was getting it drilled into me over a turkey. I also write about that world in my novella Perfect Modern Wife, now optioned to become a movie. These are the books like The Last Mrs. Parrish I hand to people who ask me for domestic thriller books to read next.

Why Is Everyone Talking About The Last Mrs. Parrish Right Now?

Jennifer Lopez is playing Daphne Parrish. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, the Last Mrs. Parrish Netflix adaptation is directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Lopez as Daphne, Isabel May as Amber, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jackson. What’s on Netflix reports that filming ran from September to November 2025 in New Jersey and Manhattan, and that Netflix has not announced a release date for the Last Mrs. Parrish movie. The authors’ own site says the movie is in post-production. Which means the book is about to come up at every dinner you go to this year, and somebody at the table is going to ask you what it’s like.

Here’s what the Last Mrs. Parrish book is like: Amber Patterson is tired of being invisible. In the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut, Daphne Parrish has the philanthropy, the real-estate-mogul husband Jackson, the daughters, and the house. According to the Reese’s Book Club page that made it the December 2017 pick, Amber “uses Daphne’s compassion and caring to insinuate herself into the family’s life.” The synopsis has Amber as Daphne’s closest confidante before long, traveling to Europe with the Parrishes and growing closer to Jackson. And then the book flips to Daphne’s side and you find out what the fairy tale costs. The authors’ site puts the tally at over one and a half million copies sold, and The Skimm’s blurb on that same page calls it “The Talented Mr. Ripley with XX chromosomes.”

Bishops Harbor is fictional. According to the Connecticut Post, the book is set in lower Fairfield County, and Lynne Constantine lives in Connecticut herself. Lower Fairfield County is my county. The charity galas, the wives who “summer,” the husbands who are somewhere in the city making the money that pays for the spiral staircase: I walked through those houses on playdates, and I recognized every room in this book.

How I Picked These Books

I read books similar to The Last Mrs. Parrish both because I love watching a perfect life come apart and because I wrote a perfect-wife thriller of my own and wanted to see who does the trick best. My criteria for the books like The Last Mrs. Parrish that made this list:

1. The perfect life has to be a performance: Every book here has someone playing a role, whether it’s Daphne smiling through the charity gala, Tom Ripley wearing another man’s clothes, or McKinley chanting about being the perfect modern wife. I picked the ones where you can see the effort behind the smile, so that when it cracks you feel it in your own kitchen.
2. You have to get inside the house: Amber gets inside the Parrish home, Audrey gets inside McKinley’s retreat, and Downing’s narrator walks you through his own marriage. Every book here takes you past the front door, because what’s behind it is the shock you came here for.
3. The perfect life has to be for sale: Jackson’s money buys Daphne’s life, Amber wants to buy in, and McKinley runs a bootcamp where women sign up to learn how to attract a husband. Every pick makes you feel exactly what the price is, so by the ending you know who paid.

The 9 Best Books Like The Last Mrs. Parrish

1. The Next Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine (2024)

The sequel to The Last Mrs. Parrish picks up with Jackson getting out of prison, Amber’s money running out, and Daphne agreeing to return to Bishops Harbor for the summer, where a ghost from Amber’s past shows up looking for revenge. For readers who finished the first book and immediately went looking for a second one.

I did not think I wanted this. Of all the Liv Constantine books, this was the one I was most nervous about, because I did not want the ending of the first book undone. It isn’t. The three people who most deserve each other are forced to share a zip code again, and every one of them has lost something: Jackson his reputation, Amber her cash, Daphne the ability to feel safe in her own house. The sisters also have a new one out this year, Promise Me Never, about an aspiring writer who schemes her way into marrying a famous horror novelist with a dead first wife. I know. I KNOW.

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2. Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest (2025)

What inspired me to write Perfect Modern Wife was finding myself having the same conversation over and over again: a lot of my friends were out-earning their male partners but still expected to do all the cooking and cleaning when they came home exhausted from work. And the attitude underneath it is not fading with age the way you would expect. According to a King’s College London study of 23,000 people, 31% of Gen Z men agree a wife should always obey her husband, compared to just 13% of Baby Boomer men. Gen Z men are twice as likely as Boomers to hold traditional views about decision-making in marriage, and 24% believe women shouldn’t appear “too independent or self-sufficient.” While all this was going on, my high school homecoming king married one of the most famous farm trad wife influencers. Here’s my take on it:

In the book, successful executive Audrey visits her old friend Jessica at a wellness retreat run by their estranged friend-turned-#tradwife influencer McKinley. Audrey expects organic smoothies and sunset selfies. Instead, she finds McKinley crawling across the kitchen floor at 3 AM, hands raw and bleeding, chanting about being the “perfect modern wife.” This 53-page survive-the-night psychological thriller novella is part Stepford Wives, part Midsommar. If Amber wanted Daphne’s life, McKinley is selling it, and I wrote her out of the same Connecticut I grew up in.

One Goodreads reviewer, –Keres–, said it’s for “Fans of The Stepford Wives or The Housemaid,” and since both of those are on this list or its cousins, I’ll take it. Horror writer-director Joanna Tsanis has optioned it for film. And if you want to read my book, lucky for you, I’m currently giving away this perfect-wife thriller for free. Get it before this promo ends!

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3. The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (2018)

Vanessa is the divorced first wife who can’t stop watching Richard’s younger, beautiful new fiancée. That’s what you’ll assume, anyway. The publisher’s own copy ends with two words, “Assume nothing,” and it is not bluffing. If Daphne’s chapters were your favorite part of Parrish, start here.

This is the closest thing on the list to the Parrish experience, structurally: you spend the first half certain you know who the villain is, and then the authors show you that you were reading the wrong woman. Richard is what makes it a perfect-wife book. He’s the Jackson Parrish type, the man whose whole personality is being the kind of husband other women envy, and the novel is really about what it costs to be envied by other women on his behalf. The reveal is the kind you want to text someone about immediately, and you can’t, because explaining it ruins it for them.

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4. First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston (2024)

Evie Porter has the doting boyfriend, the house with the white picket fence, the perfect Southern-girlfriend life. According to the book’s description, there’s one catch: “Evie Porter doesn’t exist.” She’s a con woman on assignment, and the boyfriend is the mark. Reese’s Book Club made it the January 2024 pick. For readers who want Amber’s playbook told from inside Amber’s head, with a heroine who is actually GOOD at it.

This is the most fun book on the list. Elston writes con work the way heist movies shoot it, so you are always watching Evie build the nice Southern girlfriend piece by piece, and the piece that got me is that her cover identity is exactly the person my hometown expected every girl to grow up into. Evie at least gets paid for the performance. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hulu picked it up for a series with Octavia Spencer producing, so read it before the casting fights start.

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5. Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris (2016)

Jack and Grace Angel are the couple everyone knows: he has the looks and the money, she has the charm and the elegance, and the book’s jacket copy says nobody can figure out why Grace never answers the phone, never meets for coffee, and never seems to take anything with her when she leaves the house, “not even a pen.” If Jackson scared you more than Amber did, this is your book.

Paris’s debut has sold more than six million copies, and I think it’s because every woman who reads it knows a Jack: the man who is charming at the party and something else in the car on the way home. What Paris does that Constantine also does is make the house itself the villain’s best accessory. The nicer the kitchen, the less anyone asks what happens in it. I grew up walking through houses like the Angels’ on playdates, admiring the walk-in closets.

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6. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972)

Photographer Joanna Eberhart moves to Stepford, Connecticut, and starts to suspect that something in the town is turning smart, ambitious women into compliant homemakers who live for the vacuum. It’s 145 pages, it’s from 1972, and the same Wikipedia page notes that the phrase “Stepford wife” entered the language after it. This is the original perfect-wife horror story, and every other book on this list is quoting it.

I grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut, where they filmed parts of Stepford Wives, and a few towns over from the one that inspired the book. According to Levin’s 2007 letter to the New York Times, that town is Wilton, where he lived in the 1960s. According to the Connecticut tourism office, the 1975 movie shot scenes in Darien, New Canaan, and other towns, with Norwalk’s Lockwood-Mathews Mansion standing in for the Men’s Association. So the original perfect-wife thriller was written about my neighbors and filmed in my town, and I still had to hear “elbows off the table” at Thanksgiving. Read it in one sitting, then read Parrish again and look at Daphne’s committee friends.

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7. My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing (2019)

A suburban couple, fifteen years married, two kids, the tennis club, the whole brochure. The publisher’s pitch is “Dexter meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” because the secret keeping this marriage alive is that they get away with murder together. For readers who finished Parrish wondering what Daphne and Jackson’s marriage looked like from the inside on a Tuesday.

The narrator is the husband, and he thinks he’s the romantic lead. He describes his wife Millicent the way Jackson describes Daphne at charity dinners: gorgeous, capable, a little intimidating, the kind of woman a man like him gets to keep. Downing lets you sit inside that admiration long enough to notice how afraid of her he is. I put it next to Parrish because both books are about a marriage that only works as long as nobody outside it looks too closely. According to Deadline, Amazon Studios and Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films acquired the film rights back in 2020, so somewhere there’s a script.

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8. The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison (2013)

Jodi and Todd have the waterfront condo in Chicago, the affluent routine, and a marriage that is quietly over. The jacket copy tells you on page one who’s who: “she, the killer, and he, the victim.” The book is how they get there, told in alternating chapters from each side. For readers who liked that Parrish gave both sides of the marriage a voice.

Jodi is the Daphne of this list: the composed wife who has built an entire identity out of not making a scene, and who finds out that the younger woman is not a rumor. What Harrison does better than almost anyone is the economics of it: the affluent life in that condo is what’s at stake, and the book never lets you forget who holds the deed. According to Wikipedia, it was Harrison’s only novel and she died of cancer shortly before it came out, which is worth knowing before you start.

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9. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1955)

Tom Ripley, a broke young striver in 1950s New York, is sent to Italy to bring home a shipping heir named Dickie Greenleaf, and instead decides he’d rather be Dickie Greenleaf. Publishers Weekly’s review of Parrish, quoted on the authors’ site, said readers “would have to go back to the likes of” this book to find a sociopath as entertaining as Amber. If you loved the con in Parrish more than the marriage, Tom is your guy.

Amber Patterson is Tom Ripley in a Lilly Pulitzer shift, and the Constantine sisters know it. Both of them want a life that belongs to someone with the right last name, and both of them study the rich the way I studied table manners at Thanksgiving. My step-grandfather was right that wealthy people have a code, and Highsmith’s point is that the code can be learned by anybody standing outside the gate with enough patience. Highsmith wrote that in 1955 and it keeps getting adapted, most recently as Netflix’s black-and-white Ripley with Andrew Scott, which is the version to watch after the Last Mrs. Parrish movie drops and you need somewhere to put all that energy.

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What to Read Next

Those are my nine books similar to The Last Mrs. Parrish. If the town was the part you loved, the wives with the matching blowouts and the committee meetings where somebody’s marriage gets discussed as an agenda item, go to books like The Stepford Wives next; it’s the list I built around the book that started all of this. If it was the marriage, the polished couple with a rotten center, the domestic thriller books on my domestic thrillers where the perfect wife finally snaps list is seven more women who reached the end of their patience. And if what you actually want is the influencer version, the Daphne Parrish life sold as a lifestyle brand, tradwife thrillers has you covered.

FAQ: Books Like The Last Mrs. Parrish

What Are the Best Books Like The Last Mrs. Parrish?

The best books like The Last Mrs. Parrish pair a woman who wants someone else’s life with a marriage that only looks perfect: The Next Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine (the direct sequel), The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (the same narrator flip), First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston (a con woman playing the perfect girlfriend), and The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (Amber’s blueprint).

Is There a Sequel to The Last Mrs. Parrish?

Yes. The sequel to The Last Mrs. Parrish is The Next Mrs. Parrish, which came out in 2024 from Bantam. According to the authors’ site, it picks up with Jackson getting released from prison, Amber’s money running out, and Daphne returning to Bishops Harbor for the summer. Liv Constantine also published a standalone, Promise Me Never, in 2026.

Is The Last Mrs. Parrish Being Made Into a Movie?

Yes. According to Wikipedia, the Last Mrs. Parrish Netflix film is directed by Robert Zemeckis and stars Jennifer Lopez as Daphne Parrish, Isabel May as Amber Patterson, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jackson Parrish. What’s on Netflix reports that filming wrapped in November 2025 and that Netflix has not yet announced a release date.

Who Is Liv Constantine?

According to their website, Liv Constantine is the pen name of sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine. Their debut, the Last Mrs. Parrish book, was a December 2017 Reese’s Book Club pick and has sold over one and a half million copies; The Skimm called it “The Talented Mr. Ripley with XX chromosomes.” Other Liv Constantine books include The Next Mrs. Parrish and Promise Me Never.

What Should I Read Next If I Loved The Last Mrs. Parrish?

Read a perfect-wife thriller you can finish tonight. Perfect Modern Wife is a 53-page novella about a tradwife influencer’s farm retreat that promises to build the perfect wife, set over one night, and Goodreads reviewer Erika called it “Think Stepford Wives meets Midsommar with extra snark.” Full disclosure: I wrote this one, and it’s free for a limited time.

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