Anatomy of an Alibi by Ashley Elston — Two Women, One Swap and a Husband Found Dead by Morning

Camille Bayliss has money, family connections and a husband who watches her every move. Ben is a careful, controlling lawyer, and Camille is sure he is hiding something. Aubrey Price has none of Camille's comforts, but she has her own reason to be interested in Ben. She believes he knows the truth about a night ten years ago that wrecked her life. So the two women strike a deal. For twelve hours, Aubrey will stand in for Camille in public, driving her car, using her cards and carrying her phone, while the real Camille uses the time to investigate Ben. By the next morning, Ben is dead, and only one of them has an alibi. Anatomy of an Alibi, published on 13 January 2026 by Pamela Dorman Books in the US and Headline in the UK, is Ashley Elston's follow-up to First Lie Wins, the Reese's Book Club thriller that made her name with adult readers. Like that book, it is built around a woman pretending to be someone she isn't. One weekend in Louisiana Most of the story takes place over a single October weekend in St. Francisville and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Elston makes good use of the contrast between Camille's world of old money and powerful family, led by her father, Randall Everett, and Aubrey's much more ordinary life. Many voices, many secrets The book is told from several points of view: Camille, Aubrey, Ben's law partner Hank Landry, who steps in to protect Camille and has motives of his own, and Ben himself in flashbacks. It moves between the present and the past, handing out pieces of backstory a little at a time. That structure is the engine of the book. Every chapter seems to answer one question and raise two more, and neither woman fully trusts the other. Ray Palen, reviewing for Bookreporter, called it "a solid and twisty read that is full of surprises". The crime blog damppebbles gave it 4.5 stars and called it superbly plotted, praising the way the hunt for Ben's killer and Aubrey's search for the truth about her past are woven together. What to be ready for The book's complexity is both its attraction and its weakness. The many suspects and intersecting timelines create suspense, but not every reviewer felt they paid off. Kirkus praised the hook and the early chapters but found the cast overcrowded, the timeline jumps hard to follow and the solution abrupt, saying it "arrives out of far left field". Olivia Zimberoff, in the Chicago Review of Books, admired the book's ideas about marriage, money and power but felt they were buried under procedural detail and that key twists were telegraphed. Very few of the characters are easy to like, either. Damppebbles admitted to never quite trusting Aubrey or Hank, even while warming to them a little. Who will enjoy it If you liked First Lie Wins, or enjoy thrillers in which two women circle each other and nobody is quite who they seem, this is an easy pick. It also suits readers who like a strong sense of place, with its Louisiana houses, family money and small-town connections. Our verdict Anatomy of an Alibi is a fast, clever, deliberately tangled thriller with a great hook. It asks you to keep track of a lot, and whether the ending rewards that effort will depend on how much you enjoy the twists along the way. Read it in as few sittings as you can, so the threads stay fresh in your mind.