When a British woman travels to Africa to search for her missing husband, she becomes the heroine of her own survival story in the suspenseful and smartly paced Amazon original series “The Widow,” premiering March 1.

Georgia Wells (Kate Beckinsale) sees her husband, Will (Matthew le Nevez), off at the airport in Wales and later receives a call from a friend in the Democratic Republic of the Congo saying that his flight has gone missing. Three years later, after seeing a man on cable news who resembles Will, the reclusive Georgia is convinced he is alive, and off she goes, determined to find a man everyone else assumes is dead. She is desperate and understandably impatient with the locals, employing questionable tactics to track down the right people to talk to.

Georgia confides her anxieties to Judith (Alex Kingston), Will’s former boss at a government aid facility, and Martin Benson (Charles Dance), a friend of Georgia’s father’s with a background in British military intelligence — but won’t rest until she’s on her own, charging ahead.

In a parallel story, a survivor from the plane crash that allegedly killed Will surfaces in Rotterdam, Holland. The impact of the terrifyingly staged crash caused his retinas to hemorrhage and he is now blind, masking his identity by using the name of another passenger from the same flight. A key figure from the missing husband thread overlaps with the secondary survivor story in surprising ways.

It takes a little while — and a few near-death experiences — for Georgia to realize that the more she learns, the less she really knows. Add to the mix the enigmatic figure of Pieter Bello (Bart Fouche), a former South African infantry officer gone rogue, who rounds up children to serve as soldiers in the local militia, and the portrait of the lush but savage Congolese landscape becomes even more forbidding.

Beckinsale brings a stylish ferocity to the role of Georgia, who seems to look right through people, exposing their lies. Kingston, a regular for several seasons on NBC’s “ER,” is reliably empathetic as Judith, who tries to reason with Georgia (“People don’t just walk away from plane crashes without telling anyone,” she says), and the poker-faced Dance exhibits the same flair as a behind-the-scenes operator that he displayed as Tywin Lannister on “Game of Thrones.”

Unlike many network series which dump information in your lap right off the bat like a load of wet laundry, “The Widow,” skillfully written by Harry and Jack Williams, doles out its clues on a need-to-know basis. The viewer is drawn, as Georgia is, to a world where well-meaning people somehow survive against great political odds, and you think, “Oh, she’ll find her man.” And then come the jolts and the reversals and you realize, as Georgia does too late, that she is a stranger in a stranger land — and she may not escape.

It’s a smart addition to the Amazon TV lineup.