Wife for Hire

Wife for Hire is a romance novel by the American writer Janet Evanovich, published in 1990 by Bantam under the Loveswept imprint. It is one of the early category romances she wrote before the Stephanie Plum series made her name.

Hank Mallone is a businessman in a small town in Vermont who cannot get the loan he needs, and he has concluded that the bankers dislike his reputation as a womaniser. He advertises for a wife, expecting someone who will make him look settled, and Maggie Toone arrives and agrees to the arrangement, which is pretend on both sides. She moves into his house in a town where the neighbours notice everything, and the story runs on the mismatch between the role she has been hired to play and the person she turns out to be. Evanovich wrote these short novels at speed for the category market, and this one is a comedy of manners in a small community with the paperwork of the arrangement always underfoot.

Evanovich had been writing romances for several years when this appeared, and the small-town setting and the fast comic dialogue anticipate the style of her later crime novels.