The Widow Catcher follows Delia Frost, a bank teller, as she gets wrapped up in a web of mystery and murder. She gets invited to a book club where the other elderly members are slowly dying one by one and the host of the book club believes they are being murdered. However, all the deaths appear to be accidental. The host of the club wants Delia to investigate these deaths in the hopes of being able to prove there was foul play involved. Set in a small town in Australia, most of the town knows each other which only deepens the mystery as there's a good chance the killer is someone Delia knows.
I really liked Delia as a character. She was interesting, flawed, and not someone I would normally picture as the protagonist in a murder mystery. She is in her early 50s and is thinking about quitting her job so she and her husband can travel around the country. In most of the thriller/mysteries I read, if the protagonist is a woman she is normally in her mid-30s and is trying to work her way up the career ladder or make some sort of headway in her life. Delia, however, is on the back end of that slope. She's had a long career at the bank and has two grown children who just left the nest. It was a really interesting perspective to read from and we know exactly how Delia feels about these changes in her life. She loves her job at the bank, she wants her children back home, and she's growing a bit resentful of her husband. I think she's a very interesting and flawed character and she made for a fun reading experience. It was refreshing to have a mystery protagonist who wasn't a cop or journalist as is the case in many books. I thought the bank teller angle was interesting and gave her particular insight into the lives of these people who were being murdered.
My biggest problem with the book was Delia's lack of agency in the last 40%. In the first 60%, she was reluctantly getting pulled into this murder plot. She initially thought it was just some old lady going crazy but she slowly realizes it is real. But then she doesn't really do anything about it? The last half of the book really felt like Delia was a direct reader stand in who just stood around as a pawn and had the plot happen to her. I didn't feel like she was making any decisions herself, she didn't solve the case, and in the end it seemed like Delia was in pretty much the same place as when she started the book. I wanted this nice bank teller lady to be the one to crack the case on these murders that no one else believes are murders but I didn't get the satisfying ending I was looking for. I was also expecting Delia's parrot Monty to play a bigger role in the plot since he was so good at mimicry but that didn't happen. The first half of the book deals a lot with Delia always putting other people before herself. It takes her forever to tell her husband her true feelings about their current living situation because she doesn't want to upset him. There's a lot of her going back and forth with herself weighing the options of maybe she can just grin and bear it so she doesn't have to speak up. I was expecting her to come out of her shell a little bit though this murder investigation and stand up for herself more. And while there was a bit of character development, it was no where near as much as I wanted or think there needed to be in the book.
I liked the overall murder mystery plot. We get chapters from the POV
of the various women who are being murdered so the reader knows right
from the get-go that the murders are real but we don't know who is
committing them. And then we see other characters reading about the
death in the newspaper and call it an accident. I think the real
tension in the story comes from the reader knowing the truth and waiting
for Delia to figure it out. I thought the book club angle was
interesting and I wished there were more scenes from that club. It was
fun to see them all interact and Delia's somewhat judgemental attitude
toward them. I thought centering the mysteries around older people dying
was really interesting because one character even mentions that elderly
deaths aren't looked at as closely as if someone younger had died so,
in a way, it is easier to get away with murder that way. However, I was a bit disappointed that Delia basically gets the whole explanation laid out for pretty early on in the book and then the rest of the story was her struggling if she believed it or not and thinking about getting proof one way or the other. I think if Delia had more agency in the second half of the book and actually decided to get concrete proof against the person accused of these murders, then it could have been really interesting to see her grapple with the outcome of that investigation (especially if she wanted the accusations to turn out false but they were true). However, it felt like she just tip-toed around the whole situation and didn't want to be involved at all.
Overall, it was an interesting idea and I liked the first half, but the story really fell flat at the end and I wanted more agency from our protagonist.
260 pages
Thanks to BookSirens for the review copy. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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