The Widow By Fiona Barton
By Fiona Barton
This was my first experience with Barton and it wasn't the greatest.
The Widow follows a woman named Jean whose husband is accused of kidnapping and murdering a little girl. Jean, unable to have children herself, longs for a child and throughout the story we are teased into thinking maybe she had something to do with the girl's disappearance. But the story plays out exactly as you would expect, and that enticing tidbit is left off the table.
Instead we follow the rote procedural of a detective obsessed with the case and a journalist who wants the inside scoop and talks her way into Jean's life in order to get it. There are other suspects, but the overall feeling of this book is predictability. We know who did it. There is no major twist.
I found Jean to be a milksop and not at all the type of woman I expect in a book published in 2016. She was easily led, bullied by her husband, and I was sick of her after a couple of chapters. There were so many better avenues this book could have gone down that would have been far more suspenseful and compelling. The journalist character was the only one that interested me. The writing itself was just okay, nothing spectacular. I'm not going to pick up another Barton book in a hurry.
I can't give The Widow any more than 2 stars.
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