Another day, another novel that opens with the mystery-novel trope of a woman who drinks too much to recall the past five minutes and then stumbles upon a murder scene. Ashley Elston’s Anatomy of an Alibi opens inside this familiar territory, introducing Aubrey Price as a hard-drinking, undercover woman positioned to become the obvious suspect in a crime she may or may not remember committing. For much of the novel’s first stretch, the reader is encouraged to assume guilt, if only because the genre has trained us to do so. And yet, just as quickly, the book complicates that assumption, layering in a second woman, a second identity, possibly close to the victim at hand. What Anatomy of an Alibi wants most is to outmaneuver its own clichés. Whether Elston succeeds is a more complicated question.
Set mainly in Baton Rouge, the novel follows two women, Aubrey Price and Camille Bayliss, whose lives intersect through Ben Bayliss, Camille’s husband and a prominent defense attorney. Aubrey, living in a house full of petty criminals and retired car thieves, has her own reasons for circling Ben’s orbit, rooted in the unresolved death of her parents a decade earlier. Camille, meanwhile, appears outwardly composed but quietly unravels within a marriage defined by surveillance, manipulation, and control. When Ben is found dead in his home, the novel splits its attention between these two women, both of whom were, in different ways, impersonating each other on the night of the murder. The resulting alibis *ahem* overlap, fracture, and mutate as the story moves backward and forward in time, slowly revealing how deeply entangled this small legal and familial ecosystem really is.
Elston’s most compelling choice is the novel’s doubled structure: two women, two lives, two carefully constructed performances of identity. Camille’s decision to outsource parts of her own existence, to allow Aubrey to become her in public literally, is one of the novel’s most interesting concepts, and it gestures toward larger questions about agency, safety, and how women learn to disappear inside systems built to protect powerful men. Ben’s obsessive tracking of Camille’s phone and movements gives this dynamic real menace, and the prenup clause Camille quietly works to trigger introduces a welcome element of financial and legal realism. When the novel focuses on these interpersonal power struggles, marriage as surveillance, wealth as insulation, and loyalty as leverage, it is sharp and effective.
Less successful is the novel’s reliance on procedural clutter to generate suspense. Nearly every chapter introduces a new name, a new car model, a new file, or a new institutional deal, often without a clear narrative payoff. The result is a mystery that feels over-documented rather than carefully obscured. Readers are asked to track an exhausting number of specifics, assisted by interchangeable names, offhand references to files labeled “Chief,” and tangential figures like Kevin Foster who appear long before they matter, without the satisfaction of genuine surprise. Elston’s mystery is not so much unraveled as it is repeatedly explained.
This over-explanation feeds into the book’s biggest weakness: predictability. For a novel structured around revelation, Anatomy of an Alibi is surprisingly easy to solve well before it confirms its answers. Key twists are telegraphed chapters in advance, and moments meant to land as shocking instead register as confirmation of what the reader already suspects. The frequent use of flashbacks, particularly those revisiting the night of Aubrey’s parents’ deaths, adds volume without depth, reiterating information instead of reframing it. By the time the novel reaches its final pages, the emotional impact has been dulled by repetition.
Still, the book deserves credit for what it attempts thematically. It is deeply interested in how institutions, law firms, police departments, and wealthy families collaborate to produce plausible lies. The central crime is not just murder, but the careful maneuvering of truth over time. Readers meet a man who emerges as a chilling embodiment, whose wealth and influence allow him to edit reality itself retroactively. The novel’s depiction of how a “perfect criminal” is constructed, not through innocence, but through optics, is one of its more thoughtful contributions to the genre.
Where the novel falters is in its treatment of its female characters’ intelligence. Camille, in particular, is written as both hyper-competent and strangely naive, capable of orchestrating elaborate deceptions while remaining oblivious to the most basic forms of digital surveillance. These lapses feel less like character flaws than narrative conveniences, moments where the plot requires a misstep and the character obliges, credibility be damned.
In the end, Anatomy of an Alibi is competently executed, an intermittently engaging mystery that gestures toward depth without fully committing to it. Its ideas about power, gender, and institutional protection are compelling, but they are buried beneath excess detail and an overdetermined plot. Readers who enjoy legal thrillers dense with procedural texture may find much to admire here. Those looking for genuine suspense or a psychological thriller may find themselves, like this reviewer, solving the mystery chapter by chapter and wishing the book trusted readers just a little bit more.
FICTION
Anatomy of an Alibi
By Ashley Elston
Pamela Dorman Books
Published January 13, 2026
