Book review - The Other Widow by Susan Crawford. A story of secret relationships that are even more tangled that you first think.

Joe is having an affair with Dorrie.  They meet secretly one winter night and as Joe drives them from their meeting spot he tells Dorrie they have to stop seeing each other.  Their affair has to end.  Joe says it’s not safe for them any more – for either of them.  Even in the darkness, Dorrie can see Joe is frightened.  But Joe doesn’t explain why and moments later the car skids off the icy road and crashes.  Joe is dead.  Dorrie runs away from the scene, anxious not to be connected with the crash and to keep their affair secret. 

Enter Maggie Brennan.  Ex soldier, ex cop, now an insurance investigator whose nose quickly tells her something about the crash isn’t quite right.  As the novel moves from chapter to chapter, we see little bits of the jigsaw emerge as the narrative is delivered by the three central characters of Maggie Brennan, Joe’s widow Karen and of course Dorrie, the other widow.  And what a tangled web emerges – Dorrie isn’t the only cheater – her husband Samuel is cheating on Dorrie, Joe’s wife Karen has an admirer, Tomas – her unrequited love…or is he? – and there’s definitely something hinky about the house renovation company that Joe co-owned with his business partner Edward - business cheating too.

It’s like Crawford has set out a picture with a few basic pieces of a puzzle, then chapter by chapter she adds more pieces, changing the picture every time through the narration from three different points of view.  That the narration is sometimes unreliable makes it all the trickier to work out what happened to Joe that night and why.  This approach of swapping narrators and adding revelations every dozen or so pages worked really well and kept me going until the end of the book.

Final verdict – The Other Widow is definitely worth a try even if, like me, this isn’t the type of book you’d usually read

Romancrimeblogger