The Unkept Woman is the fourth Sparks & Bainbridge historical mystery by Allison Montclair. Released 26th July 2022 by Macmillan on their Minotaur imprint, it's 320 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
The writing is the high point. It's elegantly sculpted, engaging, and smoothly flawless. Readers will appreciate the settings and descriptions. The characters, including the secondary ones, are well rounded and feel integral and more than window dressing.
The dialogue is intelligent and often rapid fire. I enjoyed the flow of the banter, especially between the two titular main characters; even (especially) when they were discussing very serious subjects, such as the death of a colleague, wartime activities and deaths, and Gwen's legal troubles re-establishing herself as sane and getting custody of her son back.
I had some slight trouble with some seemingly anachronistic aspects of the story. For example, both women have a regular psychotherapist and the parts of their sessions relayed in the narrative seem thoroughly modern by comparison and my suspension of disbelief was shaken each time the doctor says "and how did that make you feel?" or "did you consider that...". At the time the book was written, state of the art treatment still included lobotomization and electroconvulsive therapy.
There are some potentially triggering themes: mental illness, racism, sexist treatment of women, suicide ideation, The book is warmly and sympathetically written but it's generally not humorous at all.
Four stars. Although the mystery is self contained here (and a twisty mystery it is), there are major spoilers for earlier books if read out of order.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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