If you enjoy a good yarn about a terrible husband, you have been spoilt for choice in recent years.
Malevolent men are everywhere on television, thrillingly dependable in their awfulness.
There was "Big Little Lies" (violent husband), "The Undoing" (murderous husband)
and "The White Lotus" (depending on the season, fraudulent, greedy, and unfaithful husbands).
In "Bad Sisters" four women try to rescue their sibling from not one but two psychopathic spouses.
The men in "All Her Fault", a recent mini-series, are either manipulative and deceitful or selfish and inept.
Perhaps the #MeToo movement has moved into writers' rooms.
Whatever the explanation, these husbands seem to be emphasising the "worse" part of "for better or for worse".
Now comes "Strangers", a memoir that is at once a horror story, a record of suffering and a cautionary tale.
Belle Burden (pictured below) begins her narrative in March 2020.
With New York in lockdown, she has decamped to a summer home in Martha's Vineyard
along with her husband, James, and two of their children.
They settle into a routine of cocktails and home cooking.
Then comes the jump scare.
One evening, as Ms Burden is cleaning up after dinner, she gets a voicemail message from an unknown number.
"I'm sorry to tell you this," a man says, "but your husband is having an affair with my wife."
At first James is regretful, offering Ms Burden assurances that the relationship is over
and that the other woman "meant nothing" to him
(a line that has been used in many a bad Hollywood movie and therapy session).
But the next morning, his demeanour has changed.