Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks 

ISBN: 978-1-7282-2508-1

It is not blood that meanders its way through The Dead Husband. In fact, if you don’t mind being literal about it for just a moment, there’s no blood at all, as far as the corpse of the title is concerned. (A bit of blood comes in much later on.) No, what weaves its way through this tale of Family Personality Disorder is confidence. Two major characters, despite their massively tragic flaws, have too much of it, which is what’s so tragic about them. Two others start off with far too little, which is tragic in its own right.

But it’s not the characters who give this psychological thriller—the seventh by Mr. Wilson—the confidence to which I refer. It’s Mr. Wilson himself who has it. There is the underlying (or perhaps overlying) sense that he is entirely confident in his writing, his story, his characterizations, and his presentation choices.

To be clear, none of this would bear mentioning if not for the fact that The Dead Husband is unequivocally readable, and that putting it on your to-get-to-soon list would be a much better decision than all the decisions made by the assorted individuals who live and die between the covers. 

Of course, if those people didn’t make those decisions, The Dead Husband would not have been The Dead Husband. But once again, Mr. Wilson was confident enough to know just which decisions his characters needed to make in order for him to be allowed to get from his initial premise—a woman’s husband dies mysteriously, so she runs back to her childhood home—to his denouement—which takes place in that equally-mysterious childhood home. It is there, in that childhood home, where the woman must face her anguished past, her faltering present, and her undetermined future, all at once, and all in the presence of her young tormented son, inhospitable father, and malevolent sister. It is a taught, staggering, and always-surprising psychological tale.

Apparently the author had complete confidence, in the end justifiably so, that he could pen a thriller that, right off the bat, is strongly reminiscent of a handful of popular entertainments of the past, perhaps most prominently Basic Instinct, which like this story has a crime novelist at the center of it who writes about a crime that is not unlike the one in which she becomes a suspect. Maybe that will bother a handful of readers (thriller purists, perhaps), though it wouldn’t kill them to give it a try. 

The author was also confident that switching the voice of the prose—first-person here, third-person there, yet all of it with a generally similar, emotionally clipped, from-the-tip-of-the-tongue tone—would be easily manageable by his readers. Ultimately, it is, though some people (literary purists, I suppose) may have pined for alternate-voiced passages (or even two first-person narratives by two different people), each of which are totally singular in style. That may have made the journey a tad more interesting and engaging. 

Finally, Mr. Wilson was confident that his readers would remain absorbed with some main characters who are not necessarily the most likeable in the world. Readers often put themselves into a protagonist’s shoes. These particular shoes are so tattered that it is sometimes hard to feel any comfort at all. On the other hand, the main protagonist was never relaxed in her own shoes, either, so maybe that’s a way of soliciting our sympathy. In the end, she never really gets all of our sympathy—at least not multitudes of it—but neither do we find it impossible to hope the best for her when all is said and done. 

Secrets, guilt, a cold case, a bad family, a good cop, fleeting hope, sudden heartbreak, a missing dog, a mysterious phone number… it’s all there, and while there are few if any lighter moments for a breather, you may breathe easier at the end when you have a chance to decide for yourself what happens to our hapless heroine. In fact, many of us may wonder how they’ll work that climax into the movie version. As of this writing, none has been announced, but this is the kind of psychological scene-chewing thriller that Hollywood would love to tackle. 

Of that I am confident.