I’m delighted to wish Allie Cresswell ‘Happy Publication Day’ as she releases The Widow’s Weeds into the world.

This book is the third in the Widows series but it can be read as a standalone. It’s a story of weeds and wildflowers, tenacity and tenderness, and containing potentially upsetting details of domestic abuse, alcoholism, and bereavement, this is ultimately an affirmation of the strength and power of women’s friendships.

About the book

One evening, Viola goes missing.

The explanation—a visit to her son—seems doubtful, and her women friends’ messages go unanswered. A spiky, caustic woman, Viola’s heavy drinking makes her tiresome company, but they know nothing of her troubled past.

Yet, Maisie misses Viola. Recently, their shared love of gardening has almost blunted Viola’s barbs, and Maisie is much in need of a close friend. Her house is a building site, her daughter’s wedding is looming. Most worrying is her friendship with handsome, formidable Oliver Harrington. She cannot work out what he wants from it, nor, really, what she wants, either. She barely has time to wonder where Viola has gone.

As Maisie grapples with her present-day preoccupations, Viola’s tale unfolds: a dark landscape of tragedy and suffering. Their two stories collide in an explosive finale. Can the two women rescue each other?
This third book in the Widows series stands alone. A story of weeds and wildflowers, tenacity and tenderness, and containing potentially upsetting details of domestic abuse, alcoholism, and bereavement, this is ultimately an affirmation of the strength and power of women’s friendships.

If you’d like to read the preceding books in the series they are readily available via Amazon and from 1st-4th May to celebrate the launch of The Widow’s Weeds they will be on special offer.

The Hoarder’s Widow (Widows 1)

Suddenly-widowed Maisie sets out to clear her late husband’s collection; wonky furniture and balding rugs, bolts of material for upholstery projects he never got round to, gloomy pictures and outmoded electronics, other people’s trash brought home from car boot sales and rescued from the tip. The hoard is endless, all part of Clifford’s waste-not way of thinking in which everything, no matter how broken or obscure, can be re-cycled or re-purposed into something useful. Now, it appears to Maisie more grimly than ever as what it is: junk.
As Maisie disassembles his stash she is forced to confront the issues that drove her husband to squirrel away other people’s rubbish. Finally, in the last bastion of his accumulation, she discovers the key to his hoarding and understands – much too late – the man she married.

The Widow’s Mite (Book 2)

Minnie Price married late in life. Now she is widowed. And starving. No one suspects this respectable church-goer can barely keep body and soul together. Why would they, while she resides in the magnificent home she shared with Peter? Her friends and neighbours are oblivious to her plight and her adult step-children have their own reasons to make things worse rather than better. But she is thrown a lifeline when an associate of her late husband arrives with news of an investment about which her step-children know nothing. Can she release the funds before she finds herself homeless and destitute? Fans of ‘The Hoarder’s Widow’ will enjoy this sequel, but it reads equally well as a standalone.

About the Author

Allie Cresswell was born in Stockport in the northwest of England and has been writing fiction since she could hold a pencil.

She studied English Literature at Birmingham University and did an MA at Queen Mary College, University of London.

She was a pub landlady, a print buyer, ran a B & B and a group of holiday cottages before training to teach literature to lifelong learners.

Now she writes full time. Her historical and contemporary fiction has been flatteringly compared to Alice Munroe, Daphne du Maurier and Jane Austen. She has been the recipient of several Readers’ Favourite awards.

She lives in Cumbria. The Widow’s Weeds is her fourteenth novel.