Clever Twist

Set against the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and The Widow is an unsettling thriller told from two perspectives:
Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her dead husband’s secret life;
And Abby, an island local whose world is turned upside when she’s forced to confront the evidence of her husband’s guilt.
But nothing on this island is quite as it seems.
Only when these women come together can they discover the whole story about the men in their lives.
The Wife and the Widow takes you to a cliff edge and asks the question: how well do we really know the people we love?
Christian White's Writing Style
As mentioned in the synopsis, the book is told from two perspectives; Kate, the widow, and Abby, the wife, and this is done in alternating chapters.
The author hooks us in from the start, with Kate’s husband missing.
His use of alternating chapters ramps up the suspense, and White is a master of the end-of-chapter hook. For example:
Kate has found a box in the attic of her holiday home which could reveal secrets:
She then climbed behind the wheel of her car, locked the doors, and opened the box.
Abby is about to shine a light on an important clue to a murder:
She took hold of the pull string light switch in the middle of the garage and took three deep breaths.
Kate’s father-in-law, Fisher has some bad news.
The writing style is taut and pacy, and the setting of Belport Island, a fictional island off the coast of Victoria, Australia, creates a tense and forbidding backdrop to the action.
It’s isolated, deserted of holidaymakers in winter when the book takes place, and the weather is bleak and miserable.
White does description well.
Just enough to create atmosphere and authenticity without overdoing it, and he has a nice turn of phrase:
The Wife and the Widow is another mind-bending power read from Christian White. It’s a brilliant tale of deception and sacrifice from Australia’s most exciting new crime writer.
KINDLE 370 pages