Mortal Sins by Penn Williamson was a dissappointing book....I knew I was reading the book but I felt like I was hearing the voices and seeing the scenes in a movie theater. It probably sounds crazy. There was to much prolong dramatizing in slang words and character reactions. The setting was in the early 1900's between White and Negro people. It finally started emerging into a understable story about half way through. It was hard to keep track of who was related to whom but with more information throughout the book I got the puzzle put together with some confusion. However, 3/4 way through the book it was getting interesting with all the twist and turns and who done what to who. I thought I knew answers to certain questions as I was reading but Alas!....I was wrong and taken in another direction.....That's why I could'nt put it down at the end but I still rated it low.....

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A somewhat limpid and overblown style, but not a bad book. Rourke reminds me of Davenport in a way. Big, dark, troubled, mysterious, dangerous and sexy. Rourke rides an Indian. Drives a Stutz Bearcat. Flies an airplane. Sleeps around. Drinks too much. Is always questioning everything. Just a little too much to be taken as seriously as the author would like. But he’s entertaining.

Turns out that Remy didn’t kill her husband. Damon’s mother did. You see, when they were children, his mother and her father left their respective families to live openly together in sin. Damon’s father was a cop and was killed in the line of duty which saved him from drowning in the bottle altogether.

The St. Claire Remy married was the brother of a guy they hung around with when they were teenagers. H e killed himself. Or so everyone thought. Damon actually saw what happened. Remy shot him. It was almost self defense. He was going to shoot her because he loved her and wanted to marry her but, she was a Negro so he couldn’t. It seems that her great grandfather fell in love with a slave girl and took her back to the very same house that Damon’s mother and Remy’s father lived in. She had a baby and that baby was so light skinned that it could be passed off as white – and that’s what happened.

So when Remy’s father got Damon’s mother pregnant and the baby had Negro features, they had to pretend she died and give her to Damon’s mother’s housemaid. The St. Claire kid found out and was going to kill Remy for it. Damon’s mother found out that Charles St. Claire was screwing her daughter in order to make her think he would defend her brother who was sent to Angola for a murder he didn’t commit. She had to have 2 abortions. While her real mother and her adopted mother nursed her back to health, they vowed they would kill Charles St. Claire.

It was good up until then. In the end, Damon’s mother disappears into the swamp never to be seen again. One day Damon gets a picture postcard in the mail of a woman on the beach in Brazil. Her back is turned but it’s his mother. Now how in the hell did she manage to get away? That part was really bad. There were some other parts that weren’t very good either. Too many characters for example and a weird subplot that didn’t work. Also, Damon has a daughter from a marriage that ended with his wife’s death. She seems like an afterthought and he hardly spares a thought for her during this whole thing. Both the kid and the subplot could have been dropped. They didn’t add anything.

One thing that was a constant in this book was the injustice to the black people. It was unreal how they were treated after they were no longer slaves. They had no rights at all and were treated worse than dogs. Scumbag cops were always out to pin every crime on a black person. Anyone who wanted to take out their spleen on someone would do it to a black person and get away with it. So horrible. I don’t understand how people can sustain that kind of hate.