'Must be a reporter,' she says when Kate Waters from the Daily Post shows up. Their pursuit of Jean's tale propels The Widow, but its strength rests on her bowed shoulders. When he's run over by a bus, however, a London reporter and a local detective realize Jean Taylor's side of the story is up for grabs. Had he but lived, Glen Taylor's might have become a familiar story: The shadowy, creepy neighbor who rarely goes out and isn't trusted around anyone's children. 'No one wanted to know us now,' says Jean. The charges officially dismissed, he returns home to the semi-detached where his wife Jean has remained, despite being shunned by the community that knows Glen's computer contained evidence of his sexual predilections. Glen Taylor was taken into custody for the abduction and disappearance of a toddler named Bella. This is no small feat, given that both the crime and the death of the man convicted of it happen by page three, leaving several narrators to fill readers in on the backstory and its loose threads. Fiona Barton spent years writing for Britain's Daily Mail and Telegraph newspapers, and her journalistic eye is what makes this debut novel so assured and compelling. Murder does make voyeurs of us all (as Hamlet didn't quite say). However, clever though Paula Hawkins' novel was, modern writers did not invent the alternate perspective. Looking at crimes from a different angle has become something of a trope these days - The Girl on the Train, anyone?

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