Review - The Widow

A LITTLE girl goes missing and all evidence points to a man named Glen Taylor, yet the police are unable to pin him to the heinous crime.
Four years later, Glen dies abruptly in a freak accident, leaving his widow Jean in the media spotlight.
The story is narrated from three different viewpoints – Jean, an aggressive ­reporter named Kate Waters, and an assiduous detective named Bob Sparkes.
But only the widow speaks in the first person.
The narratives are mostly the characters’ flashbacks of the case and their past, with the present time being the frenzy surrounding the widow’s ‘confession’.
However, the story isn’t the straightforward ­confession of a killer’s widow as we might expect it to be.
While most of the novel’s suspense comes from uncovering whether Jean’s loving husband Glen is guilty of committing the crime, Jean’s naïveté and fierce loyalty to her ­husband begins to prompt suspicion as the story develops.
Maybe, Jean is in on it too, and she is just ­feigning innocence and ignorance …
In any case, the book is quite a satisfying read. At some point, I grew a little weary of Jean’s wishy-washy personality but in the end, as the truth unfolds, she ­manages to earn the reader’s sympathy.
Author Fiona Barton, a former journalist, uses her years of experience to fully illustrate scenes involving Kate’s actions in and out of the newsroom, as well as her relationship with the detective.
For her debut novel, Barton does set a rather impressive bar for her future portfolio.