I’m really enjoying the trend towards detective fiction with a strong sense of place, and as someone who lives in Dyffryn Gwy at least part of the time, I was obviously going to pick up this Wye Valley Widows series! (I had actually been trying to get hold of The Cardiff Killings, the start of Torrance’s other series, but my library has let all of the copies on the Libby app expire, and so I was diverted. Hopefully I’ll get back to that series eventually.)
This has a good hook and a nice set of main characters. I’ll admit that the first few pages had me feeling very cringe, and I wasn’t sure I’d manage to persist, but it is worth pushing through what turns out to be a strong commitment to a character’s cringe-worthiness rather than a failing on the author’s part. It did make me wonder a little how our titular ghostwriter managed to appeal to quite so many wives, but as I very much like some of them, I’m willing to overlook their lack of judgment in that particular area!
Setting up a series with a complex cast of characters like this can be really tricky, as there’s a fine balance to be struck between caricaturing them and overwhelming the reader with too much backstory and complication. Torrance does this pretty well. I feel like we get to know the individual women as well as the different cadences and perspectives of their marital lives pretty well, plus a smattering of side characters who’ll be useful (not least the official police and the in-laws they never knew they had). I might have liked to have seen more of the children of the Wye Valley Widows, but I suspect we might get to know them better in future series.
The downside of having all this set-up is that it necessarily impinges on the amount of space the author has to do the actual work of plot, and so some sacrifices have to be made. The introduction to the in-laws was a little rushed, moving more quickly to a ‘happy families’ attitude than seemed really plausible. I’m not sure this had to come in the first of the series, but given the title, Torrance does have to explain the ghostwriting career of her deceased bigamist, and we might forgive the pell mell chase to the end. Similarly, we perhaps could have benefited from a bit more time with our killer, as we canter towards the final conclusion at breakneck speed.
See also
These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
If you’re interested in picking up a copy of any of these, please consider buying them from bookshop.org via the affiliate links here, supporting both independent bookshops and me as an independent author!
- Rosemary and Thyme (TV series)
- A Spoonful of Murder (JM Hall) – review
- The Snowdonia Killings (Simon McCleave)
Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.
Dominique Gracia 
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