June 20, 2016
In this chilling cat-and-mouse tale from Holahan (Dark Turns), insurance investigator Ryan Monahan suspects that Tom Bacon is one of those liars “who weaved falsehoods into the very fabric of their lives until they wore their fictions like fine-knit sweaters.” At the very least, Ryan knows that Tom has something to hide regarding his 31-year-old wife, Ana Bacon, who fell off a cruise ship one night near the Bahamas. Witnesses said that Tom was at the pool at the time, nowhere near his wife when she went over. The ship’s security cameras recorded Ana’s plunge into the ocean, but her body was never recovered. Flashbacks to a few months before the cruise reveal that Tom, who recently lost his job, persuaded Ana, an administrator at a hedge fund, to take out a large life insurance policy. Ryan keeps digging away at inconsistencies in Tom’s story while a surprise twist raises the suspense. It takes a while until all the threads are unraveled, but Holahan keeps the action going. Agent: Paula Munier, Talcott Notch.
Starred review from June 1, 2016
A dogged insurance investigator suspects that a perfect wife's accidental death was anything but. He doesn't know the half of it.Even after they both lost their jobs, Tom and Ana Bacon seemed to have it all--good looks, a great home, a wonderful 3-year-old daughter--until Ana fell from the deck of their cruise ship into the waters of the Caribbean a few months after taking out a $5 million insurance policy with a double indemnity clause. Three months later, Tom's waiting impatiently for Insurance Strategy and Investment to pay up, while Ryan Monahan, a statistics-smitten investigator who was retired from the NYPD by a gunshot, is determined to do his best to make sure his company doesn't have to. His job won't be easy. Although he had a strong motive to kill a wife who may have been worth more dead than alive, Tom's also got a strong alibi: three people saw him at the ship's pool when his wife went over the side. Nor is it easy to believe that Ana, who'd just discovered that she was pregnant, would have killed herself, even with 5 million reasons, even though her body has never turned up. Holahan (Dark Turns, 2015) alternates chapters detailing Ryan's patient, thorough investigation with flashbacks to Ana's point of view in the days leading up to her death, or maybe just her disappearance. It's a structural cliche that hardly ever works, but this time it does thanks to Holahan's uncanny skill in pacing her intertwined stories and doling out complications in both of them with a master's hand.The result is one of those rare thrillers that really will keep you reading all night, especially if you pack it to take on your next Caribbean cruise.
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