3-3.5/5
I thoroughly enjoyed this and found myself surprised a few times with the revelations that occurred in the story.
Evelyn’s character arc was believable and exciting to read about. In fact all of the characters were well written and believer. Wheeler was an intriguing on and his decision felt right for his character. The fact that it was allowed by the lawyers felt odd...
The mix of personal life drama with the arrival of Meredith and Edmund contrasted with the difficult cases was great.
I’d definitely read more work by her.

I liked this book, primarily because of the protagonist, an early woman lawyer. The biggest flaw was that the relationship between brother and sister was a little on the strange side.

So far its not turned out to be a great page turner. I adored McMahons previous novels The Rose of Sebastopal and The Alchemist but this one didn't capture my interest so much.
So the story 25% in-thirty something female lawyer in the years just after WWI struggles with the personal loss of her beloved brother in the war, failed love affairs and a stifled career in law. Her deceased brothers girlfriend has just turned up at the door with her son who looks remarkable like her brother.

Part of me that is thinking of putting this book to one side as i cant summon up much enthausiasm to keep reading but im gonna give it a bit longer i think-it may grow on me. The courtroom scenes are interesting..i feel mortified with her at how sexist and horrible the judge is towards her and what a hard battle it must have been trying to forge a living in 1920s britain.

halfway thru noew-getting better and more itriqing as the pace quickens and things actually happen outside of her head.the character is very standoffish and often rude to people and im not sure why. doesnt make her very endearing.
Right ive finished it and i have mixed feelings about it. Started of very boring- sombre is probably the word Mchanon wants me to use. Once the murder investigation gets underway though and she starts sleuthing it picks up pace and is an enjoyable read.

I never really felt understood the motivations or emotions of the main charactrs and thats the main reason I mark it down from 4 stars. I like to be able to emphasise with my heroines but they were too closed and distant to the reader. The ending was left open and I probably would read a sequel if se wrote one.

For me, this was one of those books that leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions but with no desire to get the answers.

The first chapter started out strong but the rest of the book stretched across hundreds of pages that left me quite bored. I doubt I would have finished it, or even picked it up, if I didn’t have to read it for school.
Only around page 200 did I take any interest in the story and hundred pages later did it actually become mildly interesting. At page 400, with only fifty pages left, did it the narrative progress at a speed which made it interesting enough to want to read.

Meredith is an interesting character, though she didn’t feel real, more like a tool to get Evelyn to the place the author wanted her. She tells a lot of stories, but they go against each other. Her stories of James, specifically, are very strange and appear to depend on the situation.
Most other characters felt just like that: characters, not people.
Edmund was advertised to be a significant part of Evelyn’s life, but I felt he was kept to the background and only occasionally mentioned, like the author forgot him. Thorne, however, was mentioned all the time, even when he wasn’t relevant to the plot.

Now, the back of the book. It mentions the great influence of the war on everybody’s life, but this is scarcely mentioned and only in the second half hangs over the characters. Once this happens, the descriptions of how everyone was a victim of the war are very good.
The back also states Meredith claimed to be James’s lover. Meredith makes many claims about James, which as I mentioned don’t make much sense, but she never claims to be his lover.
The ‘disturbing connections’ between Evelyn’s cases and James I haven’t seen at all. Except for Thorne knowledge of his death, no one outside the family seems to have even heard of James.

Which brings me to the next point: the cases. Not bad, though quite slow. The Wheeler case only got really interesting when the trial began. Until then they had been buggering on, with nothing really happening. And then Evelyn suddenly knew everything and made up a whole story and it was all true and bam case solved. The Marchant case too dragged on for a while, until suddenly everything was settled and happy and perfect.

Finally, Evelyn. It isn’t unusual for an author to have to get to know their characters, but it felt as if the author couldn’t quite settle on what kind of person she would be. This could be intentional, but it did make it very hard to see her as any kind of person instead of a collection of words not fitting together.

All in all, the narrative was slow and didn’t seem to be going anywhere, but ended reasonably well. I wouldn’t recommend the book, but I didn’t hate it. My family and friends did note that I took a very long time to finish this book, which I suppose is true, as I never really wanted to pick it up again. The review is a bit messy, I think, so sorry about that but I wanted to leave my opinion.

Katharine McMahon’s books are quite difficult to get in Australia- very few stores seem to stock them. I was introduced to this author after seeing Confinement on the shelves at Borders in Singapore, misread the blurb (I thought it was about a hospital- ‘health’ but it was about a school ‘heath’) but really enjoyed it even though not a great deal was resolved by the end of the book. So when I started The Crimson Rooms, I really didn’t know whether it would be in the same vein or not. The short answer is yes- things seem resolved in some respects, but not in others. It could be a case of too many different plots or a trait of this author’s writing.

This book opens with Evelyn Gifford, the main character, opening her door one night to find a woman and boy standing there. The woman, Meredith, claims that Edmund is her dead brother’s son. Is she telling the truth? James died in the war (WWI) and the house has remained on tenterhooks ever since.

Evelyn is also one of the first women to graduate with a law degree and is currently working with Mr Breen and co. Recently she has undertaken her first case- reunite a woman with her children. Then her boss asks her to become involved in a murder case, which finds Evelyn investigating and finding that everything is not as it seems. To top it off, there’s a romance.

The ideas covered in the book were interesting, but I felt that there was too many plots to do justice to each. Meredith’s character floats in and out as she pleases and the ‘shocking truth’ is revealed too early in my book and then simply accepted. The love affair is potentially superfluous. The murder mystery was the most interesting and the best completed plot. While Evelyn’s championing of careers for women is important, it is too often relegated to a back role.

Will I read another book by this author? Actually, I’ve got another one on the way. They are very well written, true to time and place but I’m hoping that the next book I read (The Rose of Sebastopol) doesn’t make me think ‘so what actually happened?’

7.5 out of 10.

I won this book from the First Reads program here on Goodreads and it really sounded promising. But I've been having terrible luck with historical fiction recently and unfortunately, The Crimson Rooms has fallen into that stigma.

First, let me say that I love historical fiction books. They usually allow me to be immersed in a time period that I would never have been a part of and they have the added element of teaching me something that I didn't previously know. But the thing with The Crimson Rooms was that it was boring.

I think what mostly killed me was that The Crimson Rooms is supposed to be sort of a mystery. And I can get into mysteries no matter how badly written (ahem...James Patterson), mostly because they have this thrilling atmosphere. The Crimson Rooms wasn't like that. All of the tension that you could've felt, just fell a tad bit flat for me.

Sure, there were interesting aspects of the book, but they were overshadowed by the boredom I felt throughout most of the book. The main character Evelyn was intriguing, but even she couldn't save me from the boredom I felt. I found that I was doing things that I didn't enjoy (homework, cleaning, etc) just to avoid picking up the book again. Finally, I just sat down and said "I'm finishing this". Trust me, had I not won this book, it would've been gone so fast.

So, alas, this First Reads book was a miss. Hopefully, this one and Mistress of the Art of Death were just bad luck and I'll have more good luck with the historical fiction genre as a whole.

This was a step above the lady detective period genre novels I've been reading lately. Really well written, nuanced characters, subtle humor slotted into a grim backdrop.

i dont actually know what to make of this. i struggled to read parts of it, but still a decent enough story