After a career as a journalist, Fiona Barton loves the freedom to make up the facts for her crime debut, she tells Chris High
Former Daily Telegraph news editor Fiona Barton crosses the fictional divide with her first novel,The Widow (Bantam Press). The novel is about Jeanie, whose husband is accused of abducting a two-year-old girl. The question is, how much does Jeanie know? Told through a series of flashbacks, many of which overlap with the perspectives of the detective assigned to solving the missing child case and the reporter assigned to get ‘the exclusive’ from Jeanie, the story’s hits a relentless pace and the emotional turmoil each twist – and there are so many of them – takes on the reader is as exhausting as it is captivating.