Hannah Morrissey’s second novel, The Widowmaker, takes readers back to Black Harbor, Wisconsin, a place rife with crime and comfortable with its seedy underbelly. The setting may be the same as Morrissey’s Hello, Transcriber, but the characters are largely different.
Detective Nicholai Kole returns as a side character, but it is Morgan Mori and Ryan Hudson who occupy the story’s heart. Mori is back in her hometown for the first time in a long time. The photographer wears all black, has multiple piercings, and is withdrawn and mysterious, but there is something far darker in her past than her clothing. But the other lead, newly minted investigator Ryan Hudson, has a few secrets himself.
The two collide when Hudson’s former partner, Brix Garrison, is shot in cold blood in a gas station. It’s a bit unoriginal to have the “Black guy dies first” trope so front and center, with Garrison’s death happening in the first ten pages, but Morrissey spends a fair amount of effort filling out Garrison’s character (a paragon of virtue) as a means to establish Hudson’s character.
Morgan, a witness to the crime, is left shaken by the experience. And though she’s one of the only people who saw what happened, her far-from-squeaky-clean past makes her wary of the scrutiny that would come with cooperating with the police. Hudson must track her down and becomes pulled into her orbit along the way.
Of course the case Hudson is supposed to be working is not his best friend’s murder. He is the latest investigator assigned to a 20-year-old cold case, the disappearance of prominent local businessman Clive Reynolds. Though all he wants to do is put Garrison’s killer behind bars, the Reynold’s case is important for his career. As things start to unravel, it becomes clear that Garrison’s death, Morgan’s past, and the high-flying Reynold’s family might all be connected.
The Widowmaker starts slow, taking time to build its cast and present its world, but once the plot kicks in, the narrative is one twist following another. Neither Hudson nor Mori have had a peaceful time getting to where they are in life, and their rough road is far from over. But luckily for readers, their journey delivers a competent thriller with some truly killer twists.
