Jenna Bush Hager Announces July 2025 Book Club Pick, ‘Happy Wife’

A prominent lawyer goes missing on the night of his birthday party in Florida, rocking the small community of Winter Park — and the townspeople are quick to suggest his younger wife is capable of murder, in Jenna Bush Hager’s latest book club pick.

“Happy Wife” by Meredith Lavender and Kendall Shores, publishing on June 24, is the July Read With Jenna pick, which Jenna calls a “delicious” summer read.

“‘Happy Wife’ is one of those delicious, fun summer books that you’ll open on the beach and never put down,” Jenna says.

Nora Davies, a 28-year-old swim instructor, is barely making ends meet when she connects with Will Somerset, a 46-year-old divorced father. Their whirlwind romance turns into a swift marriage, creating endless gossip for the people of Winter Park.

When Nora wakes up the day after Will’s birthday party without her husband by her side, the community focuses on her as the reason for his disappearance.

“The setting in a community outside of Orlando, with tons of secrets, is so much fun for the summer, and I found the women of this novel to be complex and interesting, while it being the type of mystery you can’t wait to finish,” Jenna says.

Lavender, a TV writer and producer, and Shores, who works in communications, tell TODAY.com they landed on the idea for what would become “Happy Wife” after what they describe as a “meet-cute” at their children’s school.

“In classic Atlanta fashion, we couldn’t find a parking space, so my husband, my daughter and I blow in probably 10 minutes late,” Shores says. “I don’t think Meredith’s ever been 10 minutes late to anything in her life. She’s there, her son is seated, my daughter sits down next to him, I’m sweating.”

The kids had been tasked with completing a scavenger hunt while waiting for everyone to arrive, and Shores says she started panicking thinking her child wouldn’t have enough time to find things.

“Then Meredith’s son looks over at my daughter and says, ‘You can copy off of me,’ and Meredith and I just had a mom moment where we were like, ‘Aww!’ and we struck up a friendship through birthday parties and other things.”

It was at a book fair where Shores mustered up the strength to ask Lavender about her career in writing and producing for TV, and a few months later, she approached her with an idea for a book.

“I had an idea in mind, sort of loosely inspired by the way that we, at the time, were all obsessed with the Murdaugh murders,” Shores says. “And you could see the way that, in a small town in South Carolina, the way that lore and history and lineage in that community shapes a crime.”

“For me, growing up in Winter Park, which has its own lore and its own kind of energy, I just couldn’t stop picturing what would it would be like if that happened in Winter Park,” she adds.

Lavender says that after Shores pitched her the idea, her brain went into “hyperdrive.”

“I think it was just lightning in a bottle, you know? It’s that moment in time where, like, right idea, right person and then right moment,” Lavender says. “So I think for us, it was a really fun process.”

“We’d crack each other up. We’d text each other, she would send me, like, a copy of the chapter, and I would be reading, texting her, like, ‘Ha ha, this line!’ or, like, screengrabs of it,” she continues. “And I think we both did that for each other all the way through.”

The pair wrote the book together over the course of a few months. Shores summarizes the book: “A young woman falls in love with a man who is older than her and his friends don’t approve of the courtship or the marriage, so she throws a party in the hopes of winning them over, and the morning after the party, he’s missing.”

“This book, too, is about choice. These are people who just keep choosing their choice, doing it. I think that’s the fascinating thing,” Shores adds.

The authors hint at what may be coming after the release, including a possible TV adaptation (“For me, obviously, it’s a no-brainer,” Lavender says) and potentially more books, including with characters from the Winter Park universe.

Recalling when they found out Jenna had chosen their book, Shores and Lavender say there was a lot of squealing.

“To have the opportunity to even have a book on a shelf somewhere, like, I’ll be able to take my daughter to a bookstore and point at something and say, ‘We made this. It’s possible to make whatever you want,’” Shores says. “And so for Jenna to see it and like it and to give it this extra platform is like, ‘What?’”

Lavender adds, “When you respect somebody and their body of work and the thing that they do, and then they respect your work back, it’s overwhelming.”

“She’s done so many cool things in her career, and then the fact that, you know, her love of books is now creating the space for people to get a spotlight — it’s so cool,” Lavender says.