Innocents To The Slaughter by Helen Maskew

First things first, I did not (nay, could not) finish this book.  I did try, I really did but I found it almost impenetrably dull and chock full of needless filler to pad the story out to novel length.  The basic premise is a good one and the book gets off to a really good start which left me itching to read more as soon as possible.

With our intrepid heroes going through their letters after their revelations about Workhouse conditions has been published it seems their services as investigators are in great demand.  They decide that the one that most touches their sense of injustice is one from a Yorkshire mill where under-age children are being put to work and there is also a baby farming business in the town that is as dubious as it sounds.  Great, just the thing I like - a bit of social history, some perilous predicaments and a good yarn.

Unfortunately what then follows is a good quarter of the book that does nothing more than discuss their previous investigation and re-introduce the main characters from the first book.  Seriously this takes up a quarter of the second in the trilogy.  By the halfway point we are just about in place at the Mill and scouting out the moors where the baby farmers appear to operate from.  Honestly it takes half the book to set the scene - do you see why I gave up on this?

The only Innocents being Slaughtered here are those who pay full price for the book.  I am all for allowing to develop but the pacing is so slow here you are in terrible danger of nodding off as you read.  The high dudgeon about the living conditions of the poorest in society is so overdone that I found myself getting annoyed at these entitled men with their breast beating and metaphorical hair shirt wearing.  We get it, we honestly do so stop preaching about how terrible we all were to each other in the not to distant past and just tell the story already - I am not interested in 3 pages on what meal they sat down to when they arrived at the cousins farm.  I was marginally more interested in the lamb birthing by the light of a lantern of a lonely boggy moorland but seeing as that was where I more or less gave up it doesn't say much about the rest of the book.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK RECEIVED VIA THE PIGEONHOLE.