Title: The Silent Widow

Author: Tilly Bagshawe

Publisher: Harpercollins

Genre: crime fiction

My rating: 3/5

Blurb (as on Goodreads):

A young American au pair, Charlotte Clancy, vanishes without a trace in Mexico City. The case is left cold, but its legacy will be devastating.

A decade later, LA is shaken by a spate of violent murders. Psychologist Nikki Roberts is the common link between the victims, her patients at the heart of this treacherous web. When someone makes an attempt on Nikki’s life, it’s clear she is a marked woman.

Nikki makes a living out of reading people, drawing out their secrets, but the key to this shocking pattern eludes her. With the police at a dead end Nikki drafts in Derek Williams, a PI who isn’t afraid to put his hand into the hornet’s nest. Williams was thwarted in the notorious Charlotte Clancy case all those years ago, but what he unearths in LA – and the mention of one name in particular – leaves him cold, and takes him on a dangerous path into the past.

A shadowy manipulator has brought his deadly game to the streets of LA. In a crime spanning generations, it seems Nikki Roberts knows all too much – and a ruthless killer knows the price of her silence.

My Take:

Tilly Bagshawe’s The Silent Widow has all the elements one would expect from a mystery thriller. A psychiatrist who got caught in a murder investigation, a fraudster in the name of a social worker, a drug lord who has the system under his control and a PI who is determined to leave no stone unturned in unearthing the truth. With themes like drug trafficking, corrupt system, friendship, love, betrayal the book had kept me hooked right from the beginning.

Coming to character development, I don’t know why Nikki was so much obsessed with finding the truth about her late husband’s girlfriend. I mean there was so much happening around her. One of her patient and her receptionist were brutally murdered. Someone had attempted to murder her. But all she cares about was the truth about her late husband’s girlfriend who has already been dead. Her grief and resentment was understandable but what’s the use in going behind a truth that would only bring heartbreak?

One of the characters who carried more weight was Derek Williams. Before being murdered he has mailed all the case information to a person. But there was no closure of who that person was and what it contained. There were so many questions left unanswered and that was the reason why I gave this book a 3-star rating.

*All opinions are my own*