Just the Nicest Couple

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses domestic violence.

As a subgenre of crime fiction, domestic thrillers frequently portray heterosexual, cisgender couples intimately in their homes. Popular contemporary examples include Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (2015). Married characters often fulfill stereotypical gender roles in the novels; for example, female characters concern themselves with keeping the house and caring for the children, while male characters focus on their careers, cars, sports, and other pursuits that patriarchy ascribes to masculinity. Character development builds around the interpersonal relationships between men and women and how they view each other. However, domestic thrillers often deviate from the expected and established social norms as crimes unfold. Suspense builds in domestic thrillers as patriarchal standards unravel or are exposed as damaging in various ways. For instance, domestic violence, emotional abuse, infidelity, and the struggles associated with motherhood are common themes in domestic thrillers.

Just the Nicest Couple situates itself in the domestic thriller subgenre with its intimate view of two married couples. Christian represents himself as a modern husband with non-patriarchal expectations of his wife:

It used to be that Lily would be in the kitchen, cooking dinner when I got home, but these last few weeks, she comes home from work ready to drop.