This is the first book I have read by Linda Fairstein, but I will be looking for more. Killer Heat was a real page turner. The plots of the first two murders were interwoven from the start. The reader was given just enough clues to think they had the solution only to find the contradictions along the way. As a murder mystery it was first rate.

That was what kept the pages turning, but there was far more to enjoy about this novel. Fairstein exhibited great sympathy for the victims and gave important lessons to all women as the lawyer, Alexandra Cooper, faced the prospect of torture herself. Given Fairstein's professional background, you were assured that she knew the scenarios that she was portraying. An added extra were all the history lessons given out along the way. I am now anxious to see Governor's Island and the other islands visited in the investigation.

I found Charity Girl a very enlightening novel. It covers a period that is not commonly found in literature from a unique perspective. Of course, we have heard of the "studies" on mental patients and the disabled during World War II and this touches on that same violation of human rights. Besides the empathy the reader has for a young women struggling to gain control of her life in a precarious financial state, there is the outrage at the treatment of women and the assumption that they are the cause of men's problems. I was engrossed in it from the very start and felt sad for the circumstances that left her so lost. The peace that she made with her mother was satisfying since they then struggled together.

This is a novel dealing with a difficult subject - abuse. To make the reader aware of how, when and why this starts, the author uses a diary format to record the events.

The abuse begins as a child while living with an obsessively controlling mother and a weak-willed father.

After some rude awakenings with boyfriends, Kate marries Rodney and finds that he has already planned her life to be a full-time parent, a cook who will prepare his meals so that he can participate in athletic events and a Saturday night sexual partner who will satisfy his fetishes and fantasies. In short, he plans to be a married man who continues to live like a bachelor. Kate, in turn, dotes on her son, becomes a house mouse with all her scrubbing and cleaning and cooking. Her other passion becomes "building a house twig by twig, papering and painting walls, filling rooms with quilts, curtains, covers, wicker baskets, as well as furniture which she sanded, scraped and painted.

Three hundred pages of short sentences, in the form of repetitive conversations and the monotonous activities in Kate's life make the book boring and very depressing.

In the last chapter, we find that Kate has sanded, scraped and painted fifteen chairs (twenty-one more to go), and she is thinking about jams and cakes to make. I asked myself, 'are "we" really on a new route, or is this the same old circle?'

While the title is clever, the book itself is for a very limited audience.