Ever since Holahan’s first novel, Dark Turns, I’ve been anxiously waiting for her follow-up. The Widower's Wife doesn’t disappoint. Fast-moving and with multiple twists and turns, the novel begins when private insurance investigator Ryan Monahan comes to the home of Tom Bacon to enquire about the sudden death of Ana Bacon, Tom’s 31-year-old wife, who suffered a fatal accident on a Caribbean cruise. There’s little chance of finding Ana alive; disappeared in the open ocean.

Like “a fouled basketball player,” Tom seems curt and distracted, far from the grief-stricken husband that he pretends to be. As the ghost of Ana calls out to him, he tells the increasingly suspicious Monahan that he promises to never give up hope that his wife is still alive. Tom is anxious to learn about the status of the 10-million-dollar life insurance policy taken out on Ana months before she disappeared--even though the policy is still in a two-year contestability period. Tom tells Ryan that he and Ana purchased the coverage so that their baby daughter, Sophia, would be taken care of. For Tom, the fact that Ana is deceased should be enough evidence for Monahan’s company to start processing the claim, though he has not come specifically to pay the benefit.

Holahan unfolds a dark and subversive thriller written from the perspective of Ryan as he undertakes his ruthless investigation ando from the first-person narrative of Ana in the weeks leading up to the planned trip (“I’m worth more dead than alive"). Ryan's statistics-laden subconscious tells him that Ana's death was no accident. While the ship’s security caught Ana’s fall, a few seconds of footage isn’t enough to prove the circumstances of her demise. After leaving Tom’s multi-million-dollar French-style McMansion, and then learning about Tom’s career as a shamed Wall Street banker, Ryan is plagued by an unanswered question: What happened behind those blinds to make a young mother desperate enough to jump ship?

In tight prose that propels the plot forward and with flawed, vulnerable characters, Holahan contrasts Ryan (“a number's man, part detective and part mathematician who prides himself on his ability to make informed decisions”) with Ana, who struggles to make ends meet as she begins to doubt the love of her husband. The Bacons’ extensive debt--the house, the cars, the nursery school, and little Sophia’s ballet lessons--become the catalyst leading Ana into Tom’s fraudulent and devious behavior. At first the plan seems solid, perhaps a way to keep the creditors at bay. It doesn’t take long for things to fall apart.

Tom's alibi and the anecdotal comments from the cruise-goers are all that is needed to claim "no evidence of foul play.” And Ryan isn’t prepared to confront a grieving widower about his dead wife's possible infidelity. Ryan, however, needs to know Tom’s suspicions about Michael Smith, Ana’s shady boss, before confronting him over hiding the true reasons behind Ana's departure from her job as an administrative assistant. From the threat of Ana going “the suicide route,” Ryan watches Tom’s face for flickers of rage and recognition. Ryan can’t picture Tom as the callous wife-beater Ana's Brazilian parents claim him to be. There’s also the mysterious appearance of Tom’s glamorous redhead female friend, whose motivations remain mystery. While the days before Ana’s disappearance continue to be shrouded in layers of suspicion and innuendo, Tom gives Ryan nothing, then threatens a legal challenge to any suicide-related denial of benefits. Ana’s prime mission, meanwhile, is to secure her parents' safety as well as Tom’s sanity and Sophia’s future without sacrificing her life as she knows it: “I'd clung to Tom's promise to take everything and return to the way it was when we’d been rich.”

As this is Ana’s life told in triplicate, we experience every detail from her perspective, every revelation and anxious moment to whatever her future (and her past) might hold. Thanks to the inevitable thriller story wrench, Holahan’s novel is strafed with menace that constantly circles back to the missing Ana and to Ryan’s efforts to chase the truth behind a soured affair, as well as his doubts about Tom, a man determined to icepick a hole right through the memory of his wife.