Described by one reviewer as "part detective story and part interior monologue," The Pilot's Wife moves at a brisk pace through Kathryn's discoveries about her husband, dwelling only on her psychological processes, which Shreve details lyrically. Though the book contains many elements of a thriller, ultimately the solution to the mystery and the details of the plane crash are too vague to allow the novel comfortably into that category; the emphasis is on psychological exploration, Kathryn's interior monologue of grief and her reassessment of her marriage.

At one point, Kathryn says that if Jack's motive had been suicide, "there'd be one small thing that maybe wouldn't register at the time, but would after the fact." This quotation describes the novel's structure: past tense chapters telling the story of Kathryn's reactions to the loss of her husband alternate with present tense chapters that sketch out scenes from Jack and...