The Woman in the Picture

​Some months ago, I read and reviewed The Crimson Rooms by Katherine McMahon, an excellent novel about Evie Gifford and the numerous problems she faced being a pioneering female solicitor in the 1920s. This novel follows on with her story.

There have been major changes in Evie's life and she now shares a flat with her late brother's lover, Meredith, and their illegimate son, Edmund. On a personal level, she still has a conflicted relationship with her mother and struggles to get over her failed love affair with barrister, Nicholas Thorne. After the death of her grandmother, new facts come to light about her life in the theatre. Fresh complications arise when Evie's employer, Daniel Breen, starts displaying a romantic interest in her. And then Nicholas reappears.

On her professional front, Evie tackles two major cases. One represents a working class family that is being torn apart by extreme domestic violence and the other is a family at the direct opposite in the social scale and in which a prominent public figure rejects his child as not being his own. 

Woven throughout the pages are descriptions of the infamous General Strike of 1926 which is not often covered in novels. The radical Daniel represents strikers and Evie again finds herself across the court in conflict with Nicholas.

As in the earlier novel, all these characters with their failings, flaws and idiosyncracies will hold your interest. The flavour of the period is impeccable. While the resolution may be a little too tidy, it doesn't deter from what is another intelligent and satisfying book by McMahon.

Four-a-half stars

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