Can there be a righteous murder? What is the perfect crime? At what point is revenge against homophobia justified? Set during World War I and the 1918 Spanish Flu, Pansies' Revenge explores these questions. A book group is reading Crime and Punishment and becomes involved in what crime and punishment means to queers and lesbians, pacifists and free-thinkers in a time of war and contagion. Two pro-war proselytisers and virulent homophobes disappear off the streets of Wellington. For months they have been publicly vilifying "pansies". Pansies' Revenge probes the soul and passion of a city gripped by fear and highlights the record of homophobia, and its resistance, in New Zealand at the time. Romance, love, revenge, women's rights, pacifism, anti-intellectualism, sex, and gender - the novel jumps into all the issues and shows that a hundred years later we may not have changed as much as we think we have.