The Widower’s Wife

I tried to come up with a good hook for this book – something to indicate it was worth reading, would be good to read, that it lived up to its billing as a mystery/suspense . . . but The Widower’s Wife, by Cate Holahan just left me feeling uninspired.

The Widower's Wife

The book is told from two points of view, which alternate every chapter. On one side, Jake is a former NYPD-cop turned insurance fraud investigator. His is trying to determine if a woman who fell overboard while on a cruise died as a result of suicide or homicide or accident. Unsurprisingly, the insurance firm does not want to pay a substantial amount of life insurance if it turns out to be a suicide. It works to his advantage that his old NYPD partner is still in the financial crimes unit and can provide him some assistance by way of her badge.

On the other side, we have Anna, a woman whose life is crumbling around her. Just a year earlier, she had been living happily as a stay-home-mom. She was happy to play wife to her husband and mother to their young daughter in a very well-to-do suburb of New York. Her husband enjoyed a successful career as a stock trader until he lost a substantial amount of money and was fired. So Anna takes a job as an administrative aide with an unrelated brokerage firm and put her beloved daughter in a cheap daycare while her husband went “looking for a job” (aka “drink whatever alcohol he can find”). When her husband books a short weekend cruise to the Bahamas, she thinks it will either ruin them or bring them closer together.

Anna’s perspective takes place mostly in the days and weeks leading up to the cruise, giving us her perspective into the state of her marriage and the realities of their lives now that they do not have her husband’s substantial income flowing into their bank accounts.

Jake’s perspective is from several months after the cruise. Anna’s husband is anxious to receive in the insurance payout: he has no job and no idea how to raise a daughter. He needs the insurance money to keep their house, hire a nanny, and generally put his life back together. As we learn from Jake, the cruise ship has video footage of Anna falling over the balcony of her room and – presumably – splashing down in the ocean without anyone on the boat noticing. Her husband has an alibi: several people observed him talking to another woman by the pool at the same time Anna fell over the railing. Regardless, Jake is skeptical.

So, who else knows how this book will end? Yep, me too. I mean, I’ve read it, so of course I know how it ends, but I knew how it would end about 50 pages into the book.

It’s hard to feel sympathetic for Anna’s husband. He seems to have no idea how to be father. He has no idea how to be a husband. Definitely no idea how to grieve or be anything except materialistic and short-tempered. I never liked him.

I didn’t really like Anna, either. Maybe because I don’t have a gazillion dollars in my house-decorating budget, but I didn’t understand why anyone would ever spend $4k on a kitchen table that was – literally – impossible to keep clean. I don’t get it. And who fills a closet with silk blouses when you have a toddler? Maybe the author doesn’t have any children. I have two of them and can tell you with 100% certainty that a toddler will find a way to spill something – juice, crumbs, drool – on both the silk blouse and the fancy table. Probably at the same time. Toddlers are gifted like that.

I also thought some of the story was unnecessary – or left it incomplete.

Jake is very numbers-driven, very much into the statistics of things. Which is good, I suppose, if your job is to investigate fraud at an insurance company. But it seemed like some of the content existed just to the support the facts he recited in his head. He knows what percentage of men cheat on their wives? Good, write a character that does that. He knows younger woman are more prone to emotional insecurities in relationships? Better have a character for that. It just seemed unnecessary; I’m sure the facts are legit, but I don’t need a character to personify it.

Additionally, a secondary story line that came out halfway trough the book was not resolved. I guess readers can assume how it ends, but I hate these kinds of books. I want to *know*. Because, honestly, if I was meant to assume how it fully wraps up in the end, I could have stopped at page 50 and made all those assumptions instead of reading it. Granted, it’s a pretty quick read, but still – I could have been reading something else. Like a phone book.

All in all, it lived up to my expectation and, in doing so, fell short of my expectations.

Overall: 5/10

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