My enormous thanks to Helena Towers at Headline for sending me a copy of The Lottery Winner Widows Club by Elly Vine. It’s my pleasure to share my review of the book today. 

The Lottery Winner Widows Club is published by Wildfire on 26th March 2026 and is available for pre-order here.  

The Lottery Winner Widows Club

Meet The Lottery Winner Widows Club – a fabulous, filthy-rich sisterhood whose husbands all hit the jackpot . . . and then mysteriously dropped dead.

Paula is having a surreal week. Having just lost her husband, John, in a freak car accident, she’s utterly gobsmacked when, two days later, she wins the lottery – with the ticket he bought.

Just as she thinks things can’t get crazier, Paula is approached by a tight-knit trio of glamorous women – also jackpot winners – with dead husbands, suspiciously large bank accounts . . . and a very specific interest in Paula.

They tell her that they’ve been where she is now. That grief looks good on her. That freedom does, too. There’s just one problem: Paula didn’t kill her husband. She loved him, of course.

But something about their world – lavish, secretive, thrilling – is hard to resist. And when word of Paula’s jackpot win spreads and others come sniffing around for a share, she’s faced with the ultimate choice: hold onto her old life, or accept help from her new friends, whose methods are a little more . . . unconventional.

Twisty, mischievous, and deliciously dark, The Lottery Winner Widows Club is a story of luck, lies, and the dangerous appeal of starting over, from a fresh new voice in the crime world.

My Review of The Lottery Winner Widows Club

It’s all happening for Paula. Her husband has been killed in a car crash and she’s just won millions of pounds in the lottery. 

The Lottery Winner Widows Club is a cracking narrative. It is packed with intrigue, surprisingly twisty and, with weightier elements making it more than mere entertainment, incredibly satisfying to read. I found myself wrong footed and surprised by the plot on more than one occasion. 

If I’m honest, I was a bit frustrated by Paula initially and I wasn’t convinced I was going to love the book. Although the stultifying effects of losing her husband in a car crash are understandable, Paula seemed somewhat ineffectual, allowing her daughter Tilly to control events far too readily. However, as the book progressed and Elly Vine revealed more and more about her, I realised that I was at fault in judging Paula too quickly. Indeed, I went from wanting to crawl between the pages of the book and shake her into action, to cheering her on and delighting in her development. Why she is as she is becomes a central and perfect theme of the narrative. I loved the other women too. They are devious, feisty and vulnerable so that they truly spring to life. It’s also fascinating to discover how easily and skilfully Elly Vine manages to make her readers fully on the side of women with murderous intent!  

But aside from the fun and engaging story, where there are often funny moments, it was the darker themes of the The Lottery Winner Widows Club that captured me the most. Elly Vine provides so much to think about that the reader questions their own morality. As the background stories of Teddy, Audrey and Ivy are uncovered, aspects of coercive control, and physical and emotional abuse are balanced by strong female friendship, the ability to reinvent ourselves and the resilience of human spirit. Each of these aspects is brilliantly handled because the author explores them with wit, humour and understanding, so that I found The Lottery Winner Widows Club utterly captivating.

Knowing Elly Vine’s romantic comedies as Lucy Vine, I was expecting a highly entertaining, funny read with added crime. What I found in The Lottery Winner Widows Club most certainly had humour and was extremely diverting to read, with a fresh tone and a lively pace, but underpinning this super read are darker and important themes as Paula finds herself friends with other women in similar situations. Should you choose to read this one, you’ll be given much to think about even as you’re enjoying the story. I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

About Elly Vine

Elly Vine is the pseudonym of bestselling author, Lucy Vine. Lucy Vine is the author of novels Hot Mess, What Fresh Hell, Are We Nearly There Yet?, Bad Choices, Seven Exes, Date with Destiny and Book Boyfriend. Her eighth novel is Good For You. Her books have been published in seventeen territories, with Hot Mess optioned for a TV series in America.

In a previous life, Lucy was a journalist, writing for publications including Grazia, Stylist, Heat, Fabulous, Marie Claire, Sugar and Cosmopolitan. For further information, visit Elly/Lucy’s website, and find her on Instagram.