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Despite the Edwardian setting, Langley-Hawthorne seems to be writing her characters from a modern progressive checklist: the plot starts when a recreational drug-taking socialist suffragette lesbian wakes up next to the bloody corpse of her lover after they had a public fight about free love. Winifred panics and calls her friend Ursula on their new telephone to ask for help, assuming rightly that heiress and heroine Ursula can call in family favors to protect her. I'm probably supposed to find this all very advanced and shocking, but by the time we discovered that the murdered woman was bisexual on top of everything else, and that birth control was a major plot point, I had started a social issue bingo card and was looking to see if I could tick off the illicit abortion square. You'd think this would be enough to keep a slender book going, but the murder is soon tied into an ill-fated expedition to the Amazon two decades earlier, especially as more women start dying, with the implication that Ursula herself is next on the mysterious killer's list. But what crime was committed then, and why has retribution taken so long? The blurbs on the cover laud Ursula as a feminist icon. The cover copy calls her a feminist and she is - if you define feminist as a 'shallow cliche of a woman who says the right things and does all the wrong ones'. I found that she summed herself up nicely in one of her own lines - "Everyone's treating me like an interfering schoolgirl… I'm sorry, Winifred, I've been next to useless." Her first action was to call in influential family friend Lord Wrotham, and then for the next half of the book she acts exactly like an interfering, useless schoolgirl. When stonewalled about information about Winifred, she whines and flirts with Wrotham but barely gets a straight answer. When she finally starts actually investigating, she searches Wrotham's room, which is being combed for information about the Amazon expedition. I suppose I should be happy that Ursula was finally doing something proactive, but I couldn't get past the surprise that a murder case was going to be solved without a single visit to the rooms of the deceased or the scene of the crime after the corpse was removed. Just because Langley-Hawthorne knows that the Amazon expedition is the only clue worth following doesn't mean that the characters shouldn't do the most elemental of legwork. I would love to recommend a book with rich historical detail or a complex puzzle or one with a strong feminist message and heroine. Regrettably, CONSEQUENCES OF SIN is none of the above. The overblown revenge plot overwhelms the sketchy attempts to build historical background. There is little attempt to add twists or red herrings to mask the real motive. And there is more to feminism than having a book where all the women want to vote, but are in actuality being picked off like ducks in a shooting gallery while the heroine interacts more with men than with her peers.
Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, May 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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