Three Widows (Detective Lottie Parker #12) by Patricia Gibney
Genre: Crime thriller, Crime fiction, Police procedural
Read: 11th February 2023
Published: 10th February 2023
★★★★ 4 stars
DESCRIPTION:
She kissed her daughter, turned out the light and entered her own room. Too late to run, she stood frozen as a figure stepped out from behind the door and a hand covered her mouth. Fear was a bomb in her chest ready to explode. Her children. They’d already lost their daddy; they couldn’t lose her too.
When young widow Éilis Lawlor disappears in the middle of the night, with her two little children asleep in their beds, it is a chilling case for Detective Lottie Parker. Since her husband’s tragic death, Éilis is all her children have, and when Lottie sees Éilis’s house keys and phone still lying on the kitchen counter, she is terrified for the vulnerable mother’s safety.
Then Éilis’s broken body is found by a nearby lake, wrapped in an unfamiliar yellow dress, her mouth sealed with duct tape – and Lottie’s worst fears are confirmed. Someone wanted this beautiful widow dead.
Desperate to find the person behind this brutal crime, Lottie discovers that Éilis was a member of a support group for widows. And when Jennifer, a close friend of Éilis’s from the group, is found on a rubbish heap, wrapped in a yellow dress, Lottie vows to get justice.
Lottie dives into Jennifer’s past, and learns that she had lived a reclusive life since her husband died. She hadn’t been seen at work for months and had sheltered inside her immaculate home, only emerging for meetings with the group. But when Lottie questions the other women about Jennifer’s isolation, they claim to know nothing.
Lottie is certain that the remaining widows are hiding something. Can she uncover the truth before another innocent life is lost?
An absolutely gripping and totally addictive thriller that will keep you racing through the pages all night long. Fans of Robert Dugoni, Rachel Caine and Karin Slaughter will devour Three Widows in one sitting!
MY THOUGHTS:
This is the eighth book in the series I have read (somehow missing books 2 to 5) and I have enjoyed watching Lottie's character grow and that of her children. However, they featured very little in this one as opposed to some previous ones. But as with the theme in all the books, Lottie's life is not an easy one. She now lives in the large house she inherited but it is in much need of repair and renovation but as Lottie spends so little time there, she hardly has had time to organise it.
This time round she is doing battle with her mother Rose who has developed dementia and is becoming even more unreasonable than normal, making Lottie's life a lot harder. Added to that is the sudden appearance of her significant other's eight year old son Sergio, who Boyd had only just found out about recently, his ex-wife having kept his son a secret until it suited her.
But Lottie has little time to ponder these troubles as a woman's body has been found on an industrial estate's wasteland, her battered body broken and her eyes gouged out. The victim was also wearing a yellow dress two sizes too big for her and her body has been washed of any DNA or forensic trace. It is soon discovered she was a member of a widow's support group called Life After Loss. And then another woman is discovered missing after her two young children raise the alarm to their babysitter that they can't find their mother. When a second body turns up, the team brace themselves for those little children becoming orphans.
Then another goes missing, along with two others and before long the bodycount is rising and the suspect pool is dwindling. Surely they can't all be killed off or they would have no one left. But the further the team dig, it appears everything comes back to missing businessman Tyler Keating who disappeared a year ago.
What do the widows and the missing businessman have in common? More to the point, what do their deaths have to do with his disappearance? Are they linked in some way? In one of their baffling and most disturbing cases yet, Lottie, Boyd and the team have their work cut out for them in their race against time before any more women are killed.
And then on top of Lottie's home life and the growing crime rate of Ragmullin, Boyd must now also contend with the reappearance of his ex-wife Jackie who has a proposition to put to him if he wants to keep his son. Honestly, I questioned as to why this was even included. Jackie is a nasty piece of work. She is so self-absorbed she can't possibly care more for her son than she does for herself and her inclusion in this story was so minimal it may not have even been there. All it served to do was put Boyd in a constant bad mood for the entire book. My one wish is that Gibney would just kill Jackie off in the next book PLEASE!!! There is enough angst going on we don't need anymore of what Jackie has to offer.
And speaking of another bone of contention...Lottie and Boyd. Can they just get married already? I mean Lottie even made it to her wedding day (and maybe even the church) but from memory Boyd didn't? And of course something had to throw it all to crap and stop them from finally marrying after half a dozen books of them will they/won't they. After twelve books, fans are getting bored and antsy of this crap and just want them to get it together at long last. I mean, are they even still engaged?
And then there is the motive for the actual murders that were the focus of this book. I mean, what was that? By the end, there were like only four people left that it could possibly be so the suspect pool was very small indeed. But when it was revealed I was like...really? Yeah...ok. I guess the motive kind of makes a weird kind of sense but it was just a tad delusional and kind of a let down by the end of the book. After 507 pages, I expected something a little more exciting that made a lot more sense.
However, don't get me wrong. I love this series and for the most part this was going to be a five star review. Until the end. And the senseless inclusion of Jackie.
Overall, THREE WIDOWS is one of the darkest stories of the series that is compelling and a real pageturner. But not one of my favourites. Gibney can do better. And I look forward to seeing where she takes us next.
I would like to thank #PatriciaGibney, #NetGalley and #Bookouture for an ARC of #ThreeWidows in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
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Patricia is from Mullingar, County Westmeath and has lived there all her life. She spent 30 years working with Westmeath County Council.
When her husband died in 2009, aged 49, three months after a diagnosis of cancer, Patricia turned to art and writing, self-publishing a children's book entitled 'Spring Sprong Sally'. She then started writing crime fiction and created her first novel in that genre featuring DI Lottie Parker with 'The Missing Ones'. She worked with the Irish Writers Centre to improve her writing. Eventually she began a second novel 'The Stolen Girls' and through that acquired an agent and a publishing contract with Bookouture.
Patricia currently has 11 DI Lottie Parker novels to date, with the eleventh 'The Guilty Girl' to be published in June 2021, and is set in the fictional Irish town of Ragmullin, which is an anagram of the real-life town of Mullingar, where Patricia lives.
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