Kristen C's Reviews > The Queens of Crime

I read and really enjoyed The Only Woman in the Room and The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by this author, and I was excited to be approved to read an eARC of this one, but the writing was a departure from Benedict's usual style and it just didn't work for me at all. Unlike her other books, where the story focuses on the heavily-researched, fictionalized stories of real-life women that allowed the reader to learn something about those women, The Queens of Crime focuses on Dorothy L. Sayers and four of her female contemporaries of the time, including Agatha Christie, and uses them as detectives to solve a murder mystery.

My first problem was the characters. I wasn't able to connect with any of the characters at all. They felt two-dimensional and never came off the page for me. The dialogue, which I assume was intended to sound authentic, came off as stilted, lacking the panache and pluck these women must have had. The few tidbits of their real lives we pick up throughout the story didn't really pack enough punch in either educating me or in connecting me to the characters or storyline much. In fact, I had to Google the Queens of Crime to see if this was a moniker assigned to the group by society or if they were actually as they were portrayed in the story, a self-appointed subset of the larger Detection Club, and I couldn't find an answer, so hopefully there's an Author's Note added in the final copy of this book.

Probably the bigger problem I had was the pacing and writing. I found the pacing incredibly slow and the story much too drawn out. The writing itself was often pedantic and sometimes a little patronizing in how much was overexplained throughout. The book was fairly short and the chapters moved quickly, but it felt purposely drawn out, but could have been condensed even more by the time you remove unnecessary explanations and redundancies.

As a result of my problems with the characters, the pacing, and the writing in addition to the fact that I didn't really learn overmuch about Dorothy L. Sayers and the Queens of Crime, I struggled to engage with this book. I pushed through because of my respect for the author, but I honestly almost DNFed this at least once a week during the month it took me to read it.

I am sad to say that I cannot recommend this one, unfortunately.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an eARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

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