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GOOD BAD WOMAN
by Elizabeth Woodcraft
Kensington, September 2002
342 pages
$22.00
ISBN: 075820258X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Frankie Richmond is a London barrister whose career is less than flourishing. Part of the trouble is that she will no longer "do crime"; she's a lesbian, so the cases she gets are "rapes and the sexual abuse of children...so the jury say 'He can't be all that bad—she's a woman and she likes him." She may not do crime, but she's suspected of one, and a big one too—murder. A man somehow connected to one of her clients has been found stabbed and for some reason he is clutching the number plate of her car. She and her former lover and current solicitor, Kay, have to try to extricate Frankie from the mess with her professional reputation intact, preferably without landing her client, Saskia, in it.

Good Bad Woman is a first novel and has some the faults we might expect of an inexperienced novelist. The plot is rather weak and climaxes too early; some of the characters behave in ways that are more infuriating than mysterious. Nevertheless, Frankie is herself an engaging character and her circle of close lesbian friends is charmingly described. Elizabeth Woodcraft is herself a barrister who has represented clients arrested in left causes and it is rumoured that the characters in this book are based on familiar figures in that milieu, though this, if true , will not be particularly interesting to North American readers. But as an entry in the not overly large sub-genre of lesbian crime fiction, Good Bad Woman has much to recommend it. A sequel, Babyface, has recently been published.

This review is based on the US edition and thereby hangs a tale. It has been ruthlessly and insensitively "Americanized" to the point that the reader gets the uncomfortable feeling that poor Frankie is uneasily hovering somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, uncertain of where to set down. Why the publishers might have thought that an American audience able to handle references to barristers, solicitors, QC's and silks should have trouble with "flat" and "underground" is one of the larger mysteries of this edition. If you want to buy it, go for the HarperCollins original.

The UK edition is available from your local independent book store or Crime in Store in London. For once, the US cover is more attractive

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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