The Widow by Fiona Barton [in Library Journal]
While the titular widow is the character around which all others circle, she’s certainly not alone in holding secrets. Jean Taylor (read with unnerving control by Hannah Curtis) stood by her husband, Glen, through the heinous accusations leveled against him, until a week ago when he died suddenly in a freak accident.
The determined reporter (read with crisp efficiency by Mandy Williams) wants the front-page scoop about Jean’s suffering. The exasperated detective (voiced with convincing frustration by Nicholas Guy Smith) is obsessed with fully revealing the alleged crime. The mother (read with raw desperation by Jayne Entwistle) of the little girl Glen was charged with, then acquitted of, snatching (and worse) just wants to know what happened to her baby.
Glen (chillingly voiced by Steve West) has endless explanations and justifications for everything he did – and didn’t do. Declarations, promises, manipulations, and confessions collide over a dead man who can only speak the truth through the perfectly devoted wife he left behind.
Verdict: Barton’s addictive, hair-raising debut further augments the expanding shelf of alarming, across-the-Pond imports, including Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, and Tana French’s “Dublin Murder Squad” series.
Readers: “Xpress Reviews: Audiobooks,” Library Journal, July 29, 2016
Published: 2016
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