Content warning for this book: threats of rape and scenes of brutality that include forced feeding and assault, with a side order of legal manipulation and cruelty that seems crushingly too familiar.
This is a difficult book for me to review. There were a number of things that frustrated me, the development of the characters is very uneven, and to me, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of mystery.
The marketing and cover copy was also a little misleading. For example:
Elizabeth Miles scours 1920’s Washington, D.C. for a killer in the first Counterfeit Lady novel….
I just looked at my notes and thought backwards through all the details of the story for a good five minutes while thinking, “Wait, she did?” I don’t think she does that at all. If there is a killer, the crime is long over and she knows who that person is. She doesn’t scour DC for anything so much as operate within boundaries of social convention and expectation for women, and hide in plain sight within those boundaries.
[ETA: The story takes place in 1917.]
I’m genuinely confused by that part of the copy. If you pick this up expecting sleuthing, you will probably be disappointed.
Then this bit of the cover copy is misleading as well, I think:
Gabriel is the rarest of species—an honest man in a dishonest world. She knows she’s playing a risky game, and her deception could be revealed at any moment, possibly even by sharp-eyed Gabriel.
Now, I’m fully aware this is NOT a romance. It’s historical fiction/mystery, which is a genre I very much like. But because of the copy, I expected more tension between Gabriel and Lizzy, not necessarily romantic tension per se but certainly tension in their respective motivations and worldviews. That tension, when it showed up, was late in the story and was pretty anemic. I never felt Lizzy was in danger of being exposed as much as the cover copy led me to believe. The conflict suggested by that line wasn’t there much at all.
All that said, I feel absolutely terrible giving this book a C+ because a large portion of the story takes place amid a group of suffragists arrested and forced into a labor camp, and giving that grade seems almost disloyal.
Elizabeth/Lizzy/Betty/Last Name Varies is a grifter or con artist. When the story opens she and her brother are operating a scam on a dude named Thornton, who is as dastardly as they come. Lizzy is a pro, and reads people in an instant. Her instincts, intellect, and skills at manipulation make it very difficult for anyone to outwit her, and she’s able to adapt and change her story and goal in a split second. When her con with Thornton goes sour and he catches on that they’ve scammed him out of a lot of money, she has to outrun his hired muscle, who will likely kill her.
To hide in plain sight, she joins a group of protesting suffragists outside the White House, picking up a sign and shouting with the other women activists. Then, they’re all arrested – which is just fine for Lizzy. Jail means protection from Thornton.
But that’s where the book takes a difficult turn, and Lizzy’s control and manipulation of the people around her take a backseat to the history of what happened to women who were arrested for protesting and for trying to secure the right to vote for women. This part is brutal.
Lizzy is a brilliant character, and I was very happy to read about her when she was running a scene, which was most of the time. If this book were a movie, she’d be gnawing on all the scenery and gulping down the bric a brac. As a con artist, she sees through other people’s shoddily constructed artifice, and she also sees through most systems designed to take advantage of someone else. This means that once she’s educated on what the suffragists are trying to do, she sees very quickly the long con played by men, by the government, and by the patriarchy when it comes to restricting women’s agency. Though she hasn’t ever bonded with any other women save one or two, she unexpectedly forms a connection rather quickly with the women leading the protests, including the organizers and leaders, who are older women in society, and the young, privileged women who have time and means to protest, but perhaps not the physical strength to endure a hunger strike. They certainly have no experience with brutality – which Lizzy does. She is quick to help them, instructing them to show no fear, as it makes their treatment worse.
The chapters in the Virginia labor camp where the arrested women are taken (in violation of a whole bunch of laws, another con that Gideon and the women’s rights organizers are trying to outsmart themselves) are brutal reading. They are abused, beaten, humiliated, fed wormy, spoiled food, kept in disease-ridden quarters, and forced to work nonstop during the day. Worse, the women who were already in the prison, some of whom are Black, are forced to give up their clothes for the arrested suffragists, and wear rags in the cold. Even in the labor camp, class boundaries are visible, and there are a few poignant scenes where Lizzy tries to talk to some of the women there and is told how little they support the women’s voting movement because they know the efforts don’t really include them and their own right to vote.
There isn’t much mystery, really, and as a result it’s hard for me to classify this book in a way that might make sense. There isn’t a crime to solve so much as there is a set of circumstances to endure and outwit. There are layers of vulnerability within wealth, class, status, knowledge, and environment, and they all shift very quickly. Lizzy has to con her way out of many vulnerable moments, and the best scenes are with Lizzy engaged in mental and verbal fencing with whomever is trying to obstruct her goal.
While the section during and after her arrest with the other suffragists was difficult and personally very moving reading, it was also the point where the book gets very, very slow. The beginning is fast, the arrest and incarceration are slow, the part afterward plods – until ZOOM the ending arrives and shit goes down. I always wanted more of Lizzy’s con artistry than the history narrative, even though I recognize the importance of reading that history. The significance of the fact that I am writing this review on election day, though there are no elections where I live, is not lost on me at all, nor is the fact that this book is being released on election day, either.
The other thing about this story that I found frustrating is that the plot happens to the characters. A lot happens to Lizzy and the other women, and things happen around them, but there isn’t much emotional growth or development, aside from Lizzy’s repeated realizations that she increasingly cares about these wealthy, dedicated women, and her personal frustration with those feelings of emotional connection. As a con artist, she’s supposed to have zero emotional ties, and in the beginning, the suffragists were a means to an end – avoid getting caught, beaten, and killed. But her friendships are really the only emotional change Lizzy undergoes.
She also manipulates another character for her own protection, and while I don’t want to spoil the story with too many details, this part of the narrative left me feeling sad and unsatisfied. She’s really very unkind to this character, but the message from the story and the other characters seemed to be that her conduct was totally acceptable because that person was stupid.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this review, the tension referenced in the cover copy doesn’t really appear that way in the story. Gideon initially shows up as a repetitive, self important character who looks at his attraction to Lizzy as all the reason he needs to see her as something or someone that should belong with him. He says a few times that she deserves someone more intelligent, someone like him, and I did not agree with that assessment. I don’t think any of the men in this story, save the Old Man whom Lizzy works for, really measured up to the women as characters.
In fact, the book would have been fine, I think, without a number of the male characters, as the most interesting parts of the story were the developing relationships between Lizzy and the women around her. Lizzy operates within different class structures, and in the course of her adventure, the story includes some glimpses of life for lesbians in the 20s in New York, the power and powerless of society matrons and young women, and the myriad coded messages and manipulations that are part of conversation. However, I also must mention that Lizzy slides perilously close to being a Mary Sue character in a number of those scenes: the villains hate her the most and the other women adore her, unconditionally, with some individuals utterly enthralled by her, and she’s the smartest, cleverest one in the room most of the time. I was always cheering her on while rolling my eyes a little.
Despite the uneven characters, the lack of actual mystery – really, it was more of a novel-length question of How Will Lizzy Get Out of This Mess? And This One? Oh, and This One Over Here? – when this book gets going, it freaking flies. The backdrop and the community Lizzy finds herself within are the most difficult parts to read, and while the pace slows down after their arrest, those scenes remain the most vivid and affecting, even days after I finished the book. The history of securing women’s right to vote, the class issues then and now, and all the parallels to contemporary events were chilling and yet absorbing to read about.
There is one scene that I think illustrates this book perfectly.
And Lizzy smiles at him and says, “Of course they did.”
That was a gut punch.
Lizzy’s ability to see power differentials and to work them in her favor, to read the room and the conversations in front of her and make swift decisions to protect herself and then to extend that protection beyond herself, were the most fascinating parts of this story. It’s not really a mystery, and it was uneven and often frustrating. I found the ending largely unsatisfying, but I also think the book is worth reading, especially for the parts that were the hardest to read.
My hope is that as this series continues, Lizzy and the other women play more of a role, as she teaches them to manipulate and fight against all the long cons that hold them back.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
Sarah,
What a review. Did the violence encountered by the main character seem proportional and justified with the overall story?
That’s a tough question to answer because the violence is real and historically recorded. Those scenes are what happened to suffragists who were arrested. So it isn’t justified, but it is accurate representation of the violence they endured. There are historical sources in the author’s notes.
Whoa. Thanks for the clarification. I’ll proceed with caution.
The federal workhouse/prison in Virginia where suffragists were held is a real place. It is now a cool art space called the Workhouse Arts Center. There is a small, free museum detailing the treatment of the women-treatment that when discovered went a long way in getting the right to vote on the federal level. Highly recommend a visit.
@Booklight – thanks, sounds fascinating. But wasn’t the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote ratified in 1920? I can well see individual states holding out against it, as they did and do generally with voting rights, but why the protest in front of the white house in the 1920s for something already won on the federal level? I’m confused. (By the 1920s Ida Wells Barnett was organizing new women voters in Chicago, and the Democratic machine was courting them in New York.)
@Rebecca
Matter of fact, I looked it up as soon as I read “1920s”. The 19th amendment was proposed in 1919 and ratified in August 1920, so yeah, somebody somewhere is confused.
Very likely the confused party is me, though I checked the cover copy. Yup – it’s me. Dated inside as 1917. Apologies.
If the business about “scours 1920s Washington” is actually printed on the book, then it sounds as if the publisher was trying hard to make you confused 🙂
this is really weird—it looks like that copy is *only* on Goodreads, nowhere else—definitely not anywhere on the book itself. (Also I really like the novel, while fully acknowledging that it has a good case of Series Setupitis.)
I loved the book! Especially for the historical setting and content. Lizzy is a great con woman and can talk herself out of many situations. I know that the plot needed to get Gideon on board at the end for the big con. But, I didn’t like that she caved so quickly with Gideon…. I remember thinking when I was reading that section, “Come on, Liz, you can’t come up with something to say? You’re a pro!”
Nevertheless, I quickly bought the second book on my kindle to see what happens next!