(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

It begins as a fairytale romance--a shipboard meeting in 1880 between vivacious Southern belle Florence Chandler and handsome English cotton broker James Maybrick. Courtship and a lavish wedding soon follow, and the couple settles into an affluent Liverpool suburb.
From the first, their marriage is doomed by lies. Florie, hardly the heiress her scheming mother portrayed, is treated as an outsider by fashionable English society. James's secrets are infinitely darker--he has a mistress, an arsenic addiction, and a vicious temper. But Florie has no inkling of her husband's depravity until she discovers his diary--and in it, a litany of bloody deeds...

This book failed on a number of levels for me (and, judging from the reviews, a lot of other people.) It is a struggle to work out where to begin...

Let's start with the characters - Florie is dreadful. She has all the privilege in the world but the only thing she seems capable of is crying and being blonde. Hardly my idea of a lead character. The rest of the cast were poorly developed and may as well have been left out for all the impact they made to the story.

The writing style - oh my, the descriptions. Let it go. So much unnecessary descriptions of things that have no need to be said (the photographs, the writing on the wall) - just endless prose that served no purpose (except, maybe, to annoy the reader.)

The one saving grace for me was the detail about the murders. There seemed to be some semblance of believability and I give it a star for that alone. However, that was this book's only real positive...


Paul
ARH