The Widow by Jeffrey Archer

Movie reviews kooda nambidalam pola but online book reviewslam utterly unreliable. May be taste in movies is more relatable to a larger group of people as compared to books? While some enjoy the story line, many enjoy the pacing while there are people who look for literary essence, choice of words and language used. Book reading being a more niche group as compared to movie watchers, their choice of recommendations are quite unique to the individual involved as well. When i was checking for recommendations for thriller novels, this one came up and since Jeffrey Archer is someone i see as my English teacher was immediately into this book.

It started slow, infact very slow. The pacing or the way in which the story was progressing was very unlike any of the Archer novel i had read before and considering that this was based on lawyer as a lead character, was kind of surprised at the content. At the half way mark was even wondering, if it was ghost written by someone else, considering the age of Archer. Till the halfway stage, the book literally drags on with the Old widow, Netty, the titular character, keeping the lawyer character, Latch, in tenterhooks, dragging him from one restaurant to another and piling up his bills without footing anything. Latch, having latched onto the lady solely based on her words that she is sitting on multi million dollar worth of estate, with no heir to bequeath, plays along, driven by greed that he can slice a sizable chunk as fees once the widow breathes her last. She does die, but under suspicious circumstances, and having already been threatened by her step sons, the lawyer who has been taking care of the old lady ,become prime suspect. With the food that he was bringing for her having tested for poison, the lawyer even gets arrested. From here on the story gains pace and all those court room proceedings show Archer at his prime with each cross examination and defense sections coming out nice. The twist in the end being the lawyer being declared unanimously guilty by the jury even though the proceedings were in favor of the lawyer. The end twist being how easily the lawyer, with the help of couple of out of college hackers, manages to figure out the culprit and ends up being released from prison.

The reason why it felt very un-Archer like was the very characterization of the lead character. There is no twist or even a sarcastic wit here and there, leaving the character more mono chromatic than a black and white photo! The end twist was not even a twist but sheer luck of fate and it almost felt like the author gave up half way having lost interest once the character was convicted. Overall a pretty ordinary one and very slow at that.