Yet when Glen dies Jean says, “Everyone was very kind … I couldn’t tell them I was glad he was gone. He was not inattentive she was not unhappy their marriage was seemingly ordinary - at least at first.

He a little older, good looking, working in a bank, and very much in charge of the marriage. But in another sense the story of this novel began 20 years previously when Jean married Glen. Kate’s primary interest is what Jean knew three years earlier when Bella disappeared. She begins with Kate Waters inveigling the newly widowed Jean into a tell-all interview. For months Sparkes and his team draw a blank, and even when they finally turn the spotlight of suspicion onto Glen, they cannot prove that he is the culprit - in part because Jean holds onto a piece of evidence.Īuthor Fiona Barton moves the focus of her novel back and forth between the time of Bella’s disappearance in 2006 and Glen’s death in 2010. Neither her mother, who was in the kitchen at the back of the house, nor the vigilant neighbor, who watches who’s parking their car the street, saw anything. She was playing with a cat in the front yard when she disappeared, leaving behind only a half-sucked candy.

This narrator also sits on the shoulder of Bob Sparkes, the detective trying to discover what happened to Bella. There is also a narrator who sticks with journalist Kate Waters, who wins enough of Jean’s confidence to get an interview that slots some of the puzzle pieces into place. One is Jean, the eponymous widow and not always as truthful or insightful as she might be because she has had a vested interest in protecting her husband - and indeed herself. The collaborators on solving this puzzle are the narrators who tell the tale - or rather, their tales. As a reader, your job is to put the pieces together: to figure out how he did it and why, and how much his wife Jean knew or guessed during the months of police investigation and the years in which suspicion swirled around him.

From the get-go you know how the final picture looks: in this case, you soon realize that Glen Taylor is the villain who abducted two-year old Bella Elliott. “The Widow” arrives from England recommended as “twisty psychological suspense” and “an electrifying debut thriller.” It’s not either of these.

The widow barton