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Summary
Summary
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
For fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train , an electrifying thriller that will take you into the dark spaces that exist between a husband and a wife.
When the police started asking questions, Jean Taylor turned into a different woman. One who enabled her and her husband to carry on, when more bad things began to happen...
But that woman's husband died last week. And Jean doesn't have to be her anymore.
There's a lot Jean hasn't said over the years about the crime her husband was suspected of committing. She was too busy being the perfect wife, standing by her man while living with the accusing glares and the anonymous harassment.
Now there's no reason to stay quiet. There are people who want to hear her story. They want to know what it was like living with that man. She can tell them that there were secrets. There always are in a marriage.
The truth--that's all anyone wants. But the one lesson Jean has learned in the last few years is that she can make people believe anything...
Author Notes
Fiona Barton trains and works with journalists all over the world. Previously, she was a senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at the Mail on Sunday, where she won Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With the disappearance of two-year-old Bella Eliot at its core, Barton's novel combines elements of British police procedure with a psychological study of its three main characters: Jean Taylor, the widow of the title, whose overbearing husband, Glen, once the prime suspect in Bella's kidnapping, has died in an automobile accident; Det. Insp. Bob Sparks, whose quest to find Bella becomes obsessive; and Kate Waters, a reporter whose journalistic ideals are threatened by her exploitation of Jean. A quintet of performers reads the novel. Hannah Curtis, responsible for Jean's first-person accounts, slowly adds a bit of steel as she shifts from polite, subservient wife to something quite different. Nicholas Guy Smith handles Bob's chapters, catching the detective's fluctuating moods as well as his unhealthily increasing zeal in pursuing the investigation. He also portrays the other coppers and an assortment of witnesses and suspects, chief among them an angry Cockney with something to hide. Mandy Williams initially endows journo Kate with at least a shred of decency that's whittled away when she gives in to the demands of her unsympathetic editor. In somewhat smaller roles, Jayne Entwistle's turn as Bella's mother is properly weepy and resentful, while Steve West's Glen, stretching out the suspense, dies angrily maintaining his innocence. A NAL hardcover. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A woman whose recently deceased husband was the prime suspect in a horrific crime struggles with howand ifshe wants to step out from behind his shadow. Only a week after Jean Taylor's husband, Glen, stumbled in front of a London bus and died, the titular widow is beset by journalists begging for the exclusive rights to her story. Told from alternating perspectivesthe widow, the journalist, the detectiveand ping-ponging back and forth in time, Barton's debut is unfortunately more conventional than it first appears. At its core is the abduction of 2-year-old Bella Elliott from her Southampton backyard. With no immediate leads, the investigation, led by DI Bob Sparkes, flounders for weeks, which turn into months, until a tip leads Sparkes and his team to a blue van seen in the vicinity and thus to Glen, a delivery driver. Jean thought her marriage to Glen was the stuff of fairy tales: they'd married young, and he'd promised to always take care of her. She's the faithful, steadfast wife, even when the police start poking around Glen's life and it's revealed that he has a proclivity for child pornographyJean refers to it as his "nonsense." But the question of how much she really knows about Glen's guilthe was acquitted on all charges and successfully sued the police, but Bella is still missingis what the Daily Post's Kate Waters, who finally coaxes the story out of her, is determined to uncover. The idea of a woman who stands beside an alleged monster is an intriguing one, and very nearly well-executed here, if it weren't bogged down with other too-familiar plotlines. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A missing child, an unreliable narrator two staples of the best psychological suspense. Jean Taylor is the woman in the courtroom, the wife sitting next to a man accused of horrible things. The man is Glen Taylor, a delivery driver suspected of abducting two-year-old Bella Elliott. The problem is, there's no body and the one hint of a confession was obtained illegally. Several years after his trial is dismissed, Glen dies in random traffic accident. Now Jean isn't the wife; she's the widow. Reporter Kate Waters is determined to get to the bottom of the story that's haunted her for years. With Glen gone, will Jean finally open up about what really happened? Chapters jump from the days around Bella's disappearance to Jean's uneasy move into widowhood. Little slips, tiny cracks in her story, make the reader wonder whether Jean's version should be the final say in what happened. A chilling British read that will appeal to fans of The Girl on the Train.--Keefe, Karen Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE WIDOW, by Fiona Barton. (Berkley, $16.) After her husband dies in a gruesome accident, Jean, this debut novel's namesake widow, is thrust again into the spotlight. Her husband had been a chief suspect in a missing child case that captivated the country, and his death has renewed interest in the crime. With some reporters suspecting Jean knows more than she has let on, she seems poised to reveal her story. THEIR PROMISED LAND: My Grandparents in Lnve and War, by Ian Buruma. (Penguin, $17.) Drawing on thousands of his grandparents' letters, Buruma sketches the story of their marriage, which spanned World War I and II - and the turbulent era in which they lived. His is a "wholly understanding, moving account of what it meant to be Jewish and English in one of the most troubled times of the last century," our reviewer, Nick Fraser, said. CARRY ME, by Peter Behrens. (Anchor, $17.) The troubled times framed by war are also the backdrop for Behrens's novel, which tells the story of Billy Lange and Karin, the GermanJewish woman he loves. Growing up in England and Ireland during World War I, Billy saw his father, a German, interned, and felt the deep isolation that accompanies discrimination; later, living in 1930s Frankfurt, he dreams of escaping with Karin to America, whose allure is a bright spot amid Hitler's rise to power. IN EUROPE'S SHADOW: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond, by Robert D. Kaplan. (Random House, $18.) Kaplan first visited Romania more than three decades ago as a young journalist, reporting on the horrors under its repressive government. Drawing on his reporting from later trips, he traces Romania's shift away from Communism, and attempts to untangle the country's myriad influences, from Orthodox Christianity to contemporary Russia. CAST OF CHARACTERS: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker, by Thomas Vinciguerra. (Norton, $18.95.) In this ensemble biography, Vinciguerra chronicles the early years of the magazine, roughly spanning the Jazz Age through the end of World War II, with a focus on how many of its editorial stars shaped the The New Yorker's legacy for decades to come. GIRL THROUGH GLASS, by Sari Wilson. (Flarper Perennial, $15.99.) The choreographer George Balanchine's long shadow is evident in the stories of 11-year-old Mira, a ballet student in 1977, and Kate, a present-day dance historian. As our reviewer, Namara Smith, put it, the novel is less about ballet "than the costs of early virtuosity - the feeling of being propelled by a force you don't understand and can't control."
Library Journal Review
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. ["Though the characters are flatly drawn, the mystery of what actually happened.will draw in readers until the final page": LJ 2/1/16 review of the NAL hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.