The Other Widow

‘She feels as if each step she takes is terrifying, deadly’- Dorrie

When I went to library in search of a new book this one just stood out to me. I picked it up and saw that the tag line read ‘One man, two women...three lies?’, dramatic, cliché, but I’ll take it. I thought I was going to read a novel filled to the brim with crime, suspense and drama but it just didn’t do that.

Susan Crawford’s second novel tells the story of how the widow and mistress of Joe Lindsay lives become filled with fear as they wonder who killed him and try to preserve their own secrets. Though the novel presents itself as a crime drama in a book it focuses more on the mystery and secrecy of the Joe’s love interests rather than the investigative process. Crawford does have the perspective of Maggie Brennan, a former soldier and current insurance worker to show the investigation, but then her personal life becomes more of a focus, making the tag line unsuitable and pushing the novel further from the genre of crime. This isn’t entirely negative as I still became interested in the lives of the women but not overly so, as I lacked compassion for the women when frightening things began to happen to them.

I found it difficult to have empathy for the characters partially due to the simple and cliché manner in which they spoke to each other. The most glaring example of this is the conversations between Joe and Dorrie which I find to lack substance as they only seemed to talk about nothing more than work and their significant others before having sex. Though this could be a testament to how much they felt neglected by their partners and needed affection, on the whole the language in the novel was predictable.

Something that took me a while to notice when reading is that, not only does each chapter have the name of the characters whose perspective it’s from at the top and at the beginning of the first sentence, but each character has their own font. This is something that Crawford did that I doesn’t add anything to the novel but also doesn’t take anything away. I could over analyse this and suggest that as Maggie’s chapters are written in the boldest font, that she is the boldest & strongest character especially after considering her time as both a soldier and a police officer, but as plausible as that may be (if I do say so myself) I can still only see this as an novice stylistic choice.

The murderer is briefly revealed in a few chapters towards the end of the novel but it is practically skimmed over which is saddening considering how elaborate the story behind their actions were.

Overall I found the book a pleasant read despite nothing standing out to me as fantastic. It does however have me yearning to read a crime novel.