A review by eve_prime
City of Lies by Victoria Thompson

3.5

It's 1917, and Elizabeth Miles is part of a New York City gang of con artists.  She and her partner are in Washington, D.C., trying to get money from one particularly unpleasant wannabe arms dealer, but things go wrong and his thugs are after her.  She runs and runs and finds a group of suffragists rallying outside the White House, so she joins right in, figuring that at least if she's in jail she'll be safe from the bad guy.  However, the women are more than she expect - kind and sympathetic - and she's never had people show her such friendship and respect before.  She starts seeing the world and her choices a bit differently, but she'll still have to do something about this big problem hanging over her.  

It was obvious from the beginning that Thompson is not a very high quality writer, unlike, say, Laurie R. King; I'd give her prose a B-minus and that might  be generous.  However, she's a solid storyteller, and her characters are vivid and realistic, and I quite enjoyed reading it.  I especially appreciated that

she had Elizabeth come clean to the young man who'd fallen in love with her, instead of conning him some more and saving her big reveal for a later book in the series.

  I also really enjoyed the solution she had to

discovering that her young suffragist friend had fallen in love with her without knowing that lesbianism is a thing - she introduced the girl to her lesbian aunt who, with her partner, runs a weekly salon for creative gay folks.