Cleveland Plain Dealer: Second-Last Woman in England “compulsively readable”
It’s not as if we aren’t warned — by page 3 of the prologue, we learn that on Coronation Day in London of June 1953, Harriet Wallis will shoot to death her husband, Cecil. The next 331 pages explain in grim, compulsively readable detail, what leads up to this event, making Harriet the “second-last” woman to be hanged in England. The upper-middle class Wallises, their strange children, a relative and a nanny with a secret will all figure in this story, and it’s a tribute to the author that we keep reading, knowing what a sad ending awaits.