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This was a thriller about a woman who tries to discover if her ex-husband was murdered. The story also included well-drawn characters and the relationships gave you something to think about.
It was an interesting plot as well, and I would have given it two-thumbs-up except for one thing: The protagonist suffered from a common problem that happens to the main character of thriller novels. I'll call it Hell-Bent Syndrome.
This is where the protagonist spends the majority of the book Hell-Bent on solving/getting to the root of whatever the problem of the story is (to the exclusion of everything else in his/her life), while EVERYONE else tells him/her to STOP IT. Many times this path involves the main character getting (or coming perilously close to being) fired, evicted, divorced, disowned, and/or bankrupted, all in pursuit of the elusive TRUTH that he/she is SURE is about to be found.
In real life, this would land our friend the protagonist straight in the looney bin. Think about it: When EVERYONE else's version of reality is the polar opposite of yours, that is called, "You're crazy, dude." (In layman's terms.) But not in the world of the Thriller Novel.
In the Thriller Novel, the sufferer of Hell-Bent syndrome is inexplicably and against all odds proven right in the end, and gets to say "I told you so!" to all the nay-sayers in his/her life who thought he/she was nuts. And then he/she magically recovers everything lost during the downward-spiral portion of the story, like the proverbial country song played backwards. ("You get your wife back, your truck back, your job back...")
So... Although in most ways I really liked this book, it spent a good third of the story with the main character in full-on Hell-Bent mode, and I am forced to dock it down to one-thumb-up.
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