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A Way With Widows puts Carl Wilcox in a different small South Dakota town and into a case that involves three widows in the same community who have each, in different ways, fallen for the same itinerant stranger before he ended up dead in a barn. The investigation is the chassis. The actual interest is in how each of the three women understands what happened.
Adams's prose continues to be the kind of dry, attentive Midwestern voice that has aged better than most of its contemporaries. Carl's observations about the women are sharp without being judgmental, which is harder to write than it looks. The Depression texture is consistent across the series.
Four stars. One of the more emotionally complicated Carl Wilcox entries. Read as part of the longer series.
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