2010 book 72

Katherine McMahon's The Crimson Rooms
It's London in 1924 and the whole world is still in shock from WWI, including Evelyn Gifford, one of the country's first female lawyers. As she struggles to be accepted by society and by her fellow legal types, she has to help a woman reclaim her children, try and clear a former soldier of murdering his new bride, and deal with a Canadian who's arrived in the middle of the night with a child in tow--Evelyn's dead brother's child? Meanwhile, there's a romantic subplot so poorly written that I felt sure the object of her affections would turn out to be the killer (it goes something like "oh, I've only met him twice, but I can't stop thinking about him, I'm in love!" and never gets more natural or realistic from there), which kind of taints the rest of the story. Only the murder part has a satisfying wrap-up of any kind, anyway. B-.