I love WLW books, I love thrillers/mysteries so you could guess that I should have loved this book, right?
Well, I didn't ... I can't say I hated it. What's for sure is it was full of potential BUT, sadly, it stayed at that : potential. It was quite messy IMO and I couldn't really care about anything.

Don't get me wrong, it's obvious the author did a huge amount of research for this novel and the historical story per se was interesting. But it took me like forever to go through the book (which is never a good sign) and in the end it fell flat.
Seriously, I could have done without the fake diary entries. They interrupted the flow and contributed little or nothing, even making the journal entries feel less believable.. And, for sure, the author could have easily cut out 90% of what went on outside the courtroom, it would have made a better book.

I enjoyed this novel full of twists and turns right to the very end that I did not see coming. I thought the character developments were masterful as each character was fully explored in a variety of different ways. It was a really enjoyable historical fiction mystery

This was a large book but well researched. It is based on the actual crime that took place years ago and faithfully draws details from there. The story is about a couple and their children who move into New York City and the husband is found dead in a few months. What transpires next is a courtroom drama but taking place in the 1800s. The investigations and medical tests are all that would have taken place then. The suspense as to who the is killer is intense. The protagonist is Mary Fanning, who becomes a newspaper correspondent much to the disapproval of her husband. It is a male-dominated world. Mary breaks all taboos with abandon including having a full-blown relationship with her female lover. I love the intrinsic exploration into the world of poisons and how the demonstrations of them were made.
It is a sad and tragic story but teaches you as well. The utmost animalistic instinct of humankind is to kill to get their desire.
Though this book was a chunker it was worth every minute. Thank you for the opportunity to read this book.

I did not like this book that much at all. It is a historical fiction that clumsily mashes together newspaper clippings, our main character's diary entries, and third person narration. Our lead is also a woman who loves other women, and is kind of living with a woman whom she helped get out from under the thumb of her abusive husband. The side characters all are shallow representations of archetypes and kind of boring. I think I would have had a better time with it if the formatting on the ebook was better. It jumps around too much, and some pages only had one paragraph on them for no real reason. It made it extremely difficult to follow, to the point I had stopped having fun with it.

I have no real specifics because I just ended up stop caring about the whole thing. Even the surprise ending was flat. Mary Fanning, the protagonist is not as interesting as I'd hoped she'd be with her profession and her detecting abilities. Overall a massive disappointment from me.

I am not sure about this book it was not my favourite book
It follows a historic murder mystery which for me didn't hit the mark but it is well written and worth a look

1871 Lawrence & Garnett, Kansas. Early in the morning Belmont with Dr John Medicott discover the dead body of his step-father Isaac Ruthman. Soon Dr. Medicott is arrested and charged wth the murder. Mary Fanning covers the murder trial for the Kansas Daily Tribune as their first woman reporter.
An interesting historical mystery, but unfortunately for me too much time was spent on the trial proceedings. That genre of novel is not that much of an interest to me.
But overall an enjoyable and well-written story.
An ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Hmm I got through this quite quick but I'm still unsure how I actually feel about it.... I mean it has potential but I didn't love it but didn't hate it