Book completed
Mar. 6th, 2024 02:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeCity of Lies, by Victoria Thompson. Counterfeit Lady #1. My mother-in-law urged me to read it. It's 1917, and Elizabeth Miles is part of a New York City gang of con artists. She and her partner are in Washington, D.C., trying to get money from one particularly unpleasant wannabe arms dealer, but things go wrong and his thugs are after her. She runs and runs and finds a group of suffragists rallying outside the White House, so she joins right in, figuring that at least if she's in jail she'll be safe from the bad guy. However, the women are more than she expect - kind and sympathetic - and she's never had people show her such friendship and respect before. She starts seeing the world and her choices a bit differently, but she'll still have to do something about this big problem hanging over her.
It was obvious from the beginning that Thompson is not a very high quality writer, unlike, say, Laurie R. King; I'd give her prose a B-minus and that might be generous. However, she's a solid storyteller, and her characters are vivid and realistic, and I quite enjoyed reading it. I especially appreciated that she had Elizabeth come clean to the young man who'd fallen in love with her, instead of conning him some more and saving her big reveal for a later book in the series. I also really enjoyed the solution she had to discovering that her young suffragist friend had fallen in love with her without knowing that lesbianism is a thing - she introduced the girl to her lesbian aunt who, with her partner, run a weekly salon for creative gay folks.
It was obvious from the beginning that Thompson is not a very high quality writer, unlike, say, Laurie R. King; I'd give her prose a B-minus and that might be generous. However, she's a solid storyteller, and her characters are vivid and realistic, and I quite enjoyed reading it. I especially appreciated that she had Elizabeth come clean to the young man who'd fallen in love with her, instead of conning him some more and saving her big reveal for a later book in the series. I also really enjoyed the solution she had to discovering that her young suffragist friend had fallen in love with her without knowing that lesbianism is a thing - she introduced the girl to her lesbian aunt who, with her partner, run a weekly salon for creative gay folks.