Rating: 
Summary: A quick read for air travel, or waiting for baby to awaken.
Review: Pulp fiction, tightly crafted, quickly paced, conveniently plotted with forty-eleven twists and that is one too many. I'll bet it didn't take more than six days to keyboard this cheap thriller, and only then because he added all the conceivable endings. A good read if you're looking for a page turner than doesn't matter, but if you read many mysteries you will predict the entire book after the first three chapters.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely boring!
Review: The book is boring to the last degree. The first 100 pages are wasted with pointless scene settings and unimportant details. The characters are not believable. Nor likeable either. The judge is so naive. He doesn't have the makings of a good likeable lead character. The answer to the "who did it" question is so obvious from the very beginning. The book really breaks some of the most defining characteristics of mystery novels, which is: don't make the answer to the "who did it" so predictable. This must be a puzzle that bewilders the reader to a facsinating degree. The reader should enjoy doing some wild predictions only to be proven wrong later in the book. That is what mystery/thriller novel should be all about. In this book we were robbed of that enjoyment. Damn it. Please don't wante your money and time on this worthless book.I wish I did not buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: How dumb can a judge be?
Review: The courtroom dialog is quite accurate- but I never met a judge that naive - of course he was a contract lawyer before coming on the bench. Robert traver where are you?
Rating:
Summary: Not awful, but very close.
Review: This book give hope to all aspiring writers. If this kind of tripe can get published, anything can. The dialogue is so bad, it's embarrassing. There is not one believable character in the entire book. The plot twists make you wonder what Margolin was smoking when he wrote it. The book makes Dumb and Dumber seem plausible.
Rating: 
Summary: I enjoyed this book
Review: This book keeps you second-guessing on who the suspect was till the end.
Rating:
Summary: An over-plotted court room thriller
Review: This book starts off ok revealing the character of a "straight-arrow" lawyer turned judge. Unfortunately it departs from this and becomes a series of difficult to believe subplots with an increasing array of unsavory characters doing difficult to follow machinations. The "judge" is a combination of extreme naiveity mixed with deep-seated idealism which is increasingly hard to believe. A good story which is over-plotted and could have benefited from better editing.
Rating:
Summary: Good plot twists, fair characters, OK story
Review: This book was just OK, the story did keep me guessing for the most part, but there was one event with the judge that was so out of character for him that it kind of ruined the rest of the book. But, I guess the author had to make the story more interesting somehow.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping and interesting, but some major flaws
Review: This is an exciting and well written mystery, with a couple of flaws. The story is of a judge who presides over a murder case with political ramifications. His marriage is shaky as the book begins, and there is a plot by some people with interests in the case to capitalize on his marital problems by setting him up and blackmailing him. The plot is complex and interesting enough to maintain the interest of most mystery fans, but there are a couple of problems. Probably the main problem is that I knew the guilty party almost immediately, purely on the basis of the political philosophies of the characters [and I'm being deliberately vague here to avoid giving things away]. When a book is as predictably politically correct as that, it is a major drawback. Secondly, as many other reviewers have mentioned, the plot to blackmail the judge was so transparent that it is inconceivable that anyone smart enough to be a judge would not have seen through it.Neither of those problems prevented me from enjoying the book. They just caused me to feel some annoyance when the book was finished. As is so often the case, I want more flexibility in Amazon's rating system, and would have given it three and a half stars if that were allowed. So read this book, but don't expect a masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: An Ok, Courtroom Novel!
Review: This was my first Phillip Margolin novel and I enjoyed it a lot! I discovered him in a big pile of books from my grandma and was quite surprised at how good "The Undertakers Widow" was. I have read a lot of books by John Grisham, J.F. Freedman, and other courtroom suspense authors and I felt that "The Undertakers Widow" was better than most, other than the ending. I didn't like the way that the end turned out. But other then that it was a pretty good book.
Rating:
Summary: A Fairly Good Legal Suspense Novel!
Review: To be exact, I would give this novel 3 1/2 stars. I liked the whole novel a lot. Good characters, great suspense, good action scenes and events. I felt that Phillip Margolin did a good job describing the scene of the courtroom in detail. But the thing with the novel that I didn't like is the ending. WHAT THE HECK WAS MR. MARGOLIN THINKING? The obvious bad guys who Margolin portrayed the whole way through would have been a much better choice for the killers than the one he picked. Very bizarre! So to sum up, the first 3/4 of the novel was great, but the ending could have been a lot better. But I will definitely give Phillip Margolin another try, because I loved Gone, But Not Forgotten.
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