Mortal Sins

Faithful fans of bestselling romance writer Penelope Williamson may enthuse about her crossover into mainstream suspense, but thriller aficionados will conclude that it takes something more than a slightly altered pseudonym to ratchet up the tension. Set in 1927 in New Orleans at the height of the Roaring '20s' speakeasy days, this relentlessly atmospheric tale of murder and miscegenation mistakes excessively wordy prose for rich and stylish language. When a wealthy playboy lawyer is found slashed to death in a former slave cabin on his family estate, New Orleans cop Daman Rourke--an ex-WWI flying ace--is appalled by what looks to be an open-and-shut case against the obvious culprit, Remy Lelourie, Rourke's childhood sweetheart, who has just returned to her hometown a triumphant goddess of the silver screen. The plot takes more turns than the bayou waterways in describing the hero's tragic marriage, his mother's tawdry affair with the scion of a wealthy family, a boyhood friend-turned-gangster boss, a poor black prizefighter wrongly convicted of murder and his beautiful light-skinned wife, who is abused by her husband's attorney. Cluttered with similes and descriptions (sometimes good, more often strained) and murky flashbacks, the narrative suffers through a maze of repetition early on, as the author struggles to establish the web of obscure subplots. The story eventually becomes more lucid as it approaches the home stretch. But, alas, Williamson never quite manages to extricate the colorful characters from a boggy morass of metaphoric quicksand. Despite a genuine sense of place and story, she winds up shortchanging the suspense with too much purple prose. (June)