A historical account of Marguerite Steinheil ('the Red Widow"), a real-life French femme fatale who used her influence to arrange governmental appointments, blackmailed her opponents, and may have even attempted to poison those who got in the way of her agenda—and also mysteriously survived a home invasion that left her husband and mother dead, leaving the police with more questions than answers.
Plenty of salacious tidbits make The Red Widow fun to read, but Ms. Horowitz...delivers more than a lurid tale of murder. She examines the moral attitude of a society in which women like Steinheil had little independence and were forced to rely on men for their survival ... Ms. Horowitz’s book is well researched, but her portrait of Steinheil doesn’t go very deep, and her descriptions of Belle Époque Paris and its salons are surprisingly flat. For a better picture, look to Steinheil’s own lively, unreliable memoir.
Very detailed ... Horowitz has pieced together a fascinating story of a woman who 'lied all her life' and died in 1954 at the age of 86 in a Hove nursing home, taking her secrets with her.
