Widow's Tale

I'm really undecided how I feel about A Widow's Tale by Frances Paul. It's admittedly not my usual reading genre so my reactions might result from leaving my comfort zone. However, while certain scenes had me gripped, I also nearly DNFd this novel twice. Aspects I particularly enjoyed were when we got to see our heroine, Karina, in action. She's a kick-ass assassin and the head of an Argentinean drug dealing family - neither of which are the usual career choices for fictional women - so I appreciated how Paul has turned gender stereotypes upside down in this way. There's lots of macho tough talk which is entertaining and Paul writes her action scenes as though they were movie clips which results in a fast, exciting pace as bullets fly and buildings explode.

I struggled, though, with Paul's idiosyncratic writing style. She frequently uses disjointed sentence fragments and jumps between tenses. Initially I blamed poor proofreading or insufficient editing, but this style remains consistent over the five hundred pages of A Widow's Tale and I did become accustomed to it eventually. As A Widow's Tale is an action read, there is limited emphasis given to the characters' emotional development. When crime family is pitted against crime family, not getting shot is a much higher priority for most of them! I would have preferred deeper motivations than the spiralling eye for an eye revenge scenarios. I'm not sure that I would personally venture into another Frances Paul novel after reading this one, but, for action thriller fans who are already chafing at self-isolation, A Widow's Tale could provide plenty of exciting escapism!