Brian Moore established his reputation with his first novel, "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne," in 1956. The Irish setting gave a special poignancy to this portrait of a sad middle-class spinster resolutely slipping into emotional destitution. Subsequent novels have revealed the author's continuing willingness to pay attention to the dreary and unloved, the lapsed and fallible who would rather have some immediate human affection than wait for God's promised kingdom….

["Cold Heaven"] begins in Nice, with a quick and violent boating accident in the Baie des Anges. While Dr. Alex Davenport is swimming, a motor boat crashes into him and leaves him close to death. His wife, Marie, is distraught over the accident and its ironic timing: She had been planning to tell him that day that she intended to leave him for another physician…. (p. 11)

Gradually it becomes clear to the reader that Marie has imagined a...