The Pilot's Wife

May 1, 1998
From the initial knock on the door at 3 a.m. to some five months later, Katharine Lyons finds herself in the grips of extreme emotion. Her pilot husband Jack's plane, with 103 passengers aboard, has exploded off the coast of Ireland. A union rep, Robert Hart, guides her through the first hours of grief and shock, fending off phone calls and bringing her soup. When aircrash investigators indicate they suspect a bomb and that Jack is somehow implicated, Hart becomes instrumental in protecting Katharine and her daughter from both the media and the airline, which is desperate to find a scapegoat for the disaster. As Katharine is forced to repeatedly absorb startling new information about her husband, she must face the fact that she did not really know the man she had been happily married to for 16 years. Shreve ("The Weight of Water" ) is a graceful writer who knows just what she's doing--weaving a compelling plot through which she explores deeper issues, such as intimacy and grief. ((Reviewed May 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)