39 minute read
FEVERED STAR by Rebecca Roanhorse
the mad girls of new york
COVER STORY
Rigetti, Susan Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $27.99 | April 5, 2022 978-0-06-307205-3
An unsophisticated intern at a fashion magazine fears her new, wealthy mentor may be a con artist. Rigetti’s entertaining first novel lays out how easily a grifter can take advantage of the system—and the naïve. And no one seems to be a better target for a con artist than unsophisticated would-be writer Lora Ricci from Allentown, Pennsylvania. Lora has just started an internship at glamorous Elle magazine in Manhattan, but she feels overwhelmed. She has failed her courses at NYU and is hiding her lost scholarship from her parents, and she knows she’s at a disadvantage compared to the other trust fund–fueled interns around her. Then she meets charismatic contributing editor Cat Wolff, heiress to an Austrian billionaire’s fortune, who offers her an opportunity that seems too good to be true. She invites Lora to move into her huge suite at the Plaza Hotel so that Lora can ghostwrite short stories for her, a plan that will surely catapult them to a lucrative literary contract. A savvier writer might balk at such a ridiculous suggestion—trying to climb the literary ladder is hardly the best way to access instant wealth—but the plan sounds plausible to the increasingly desperate Lora, who doesn’t know what to do when her internship ends. Meanwhile, readers know something that Lora does not: Rigetti reveals from the start of this clever, fast-paced book that Cat is not all that she seems. The novel’s opening pages consist of an FBI transcript, and Rigetti tells the story using a variety of ephemera—journal entries, Instagram posts, texts—to heighten the mystery as Lora begins to question Cat’s motives and actions. This isn’t a book to take too seriously, but the crafty Rigetti makes fraud a lot of fun.
An entertaining shell game of a novel.
FEVERED STAR
Roanhorse, Rebecca Saga/Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $27.99 | April 19, 2022 978-1-5344-3773-9
The much-anticipated second book in Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky series finds Serapio, Naranpa, and Xiala scrambling to find their footing after the explosive ending of Black Sun. Having executed his dark purpose as the Crow God’s human avatar and causing a mysterious eclipse that blocks the sun over the city of Tova, Serapio wakes up gravely injured. One of the giant crows of clan Carrion Crow rescued him, and Okoa, the captain of the Shield, is nursing him back to health. Serapio learns that he can’t necessarily trust everyone from Carrion Crow and also that he will continue to be treated not as a human being but as a weapon for the clan. Xiala, meanwhile, is desperate to find Serapio but is lost in an unfamiliar city and eventually makes some uneasy alliances in order to protect him. And Naranpa, the dethroned Sun Priest, literally crawls out from a tomb and discovers that she and her opposite, Serapio, may not be such opposites after all. The second in a trilogy, this novel does suffer from some inevitable pitfalls. There’s a lot of cleaning up after the end of Book 1 and more setting the stage for what’s to come. But even a middle book from Roanhorse is still a book from Roanhorse, with all the excellent plot machinations and stellar prose that readers know to expect from her. She delves further into the political history of the Meridian and saves room for a few big twists to wind up the anticipation for Book 3.
An excellent second installment that adds even more detail and intrigue.
THE MAD GIRLS OF NEW YORK
Rodale, Maya Berkley (336 pp.) $17.00 paper | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-43675-2
Indomitable investigative journalist Nellie Bly spends 10 days in a notorious asylum in Rodale’s historical novel. It’s 1887, and after four months spent knocking on doors on Newspaper Row, aspiring journalist Nellie Bly has yet to take New York City by storm. The ever determined 23-year-old is especially good at asking questions and believing in herself, but so far all her tenacity has gotten her is a recommendation to write for the ladies’ papers. It doesn’t help that every prominent male editor in the city has the same belief—women are too delicate, too emotional, too inaccurate to efficiently report the news. So when Nellie stumbles upon an underground women’s group called the Ladies’ Ordinary, she’s thrilled to discover a secret weapon that will help her prove her worth. There, Nellie meets a crew of women journalists who introduce her to the world of stunt reporting: “Nothing sells like a crusade and a girl in danger.” With her friends’ help, Nellie meets with Col. John Cockerill, the World’s editor, and convinces him to hire her as a stuntwoman reporter who will infiltrate the infamous Blackwell’s Island insane asylum for women. Easily enough, Nellie finds herself en route to the island, but what awaits her in the middle of the East River is more dreadful than she dared prepare for. When one week turns into 10 days, and with the Sun’s Sam Colton hot on her story’s tail, Nellie wonders if she’ll be able to survive her dire circumstances long enough to relay her exposé to the world. While Rodale takes some liberties—for example, Blackwell’s darkly humorous “Prayer Girl” is based on one line of the real Nellie Bly’s “Ten Days in a Mad-House” (1887)—all her main characters are inspired by real historical figures. Rodale’s affinity for writing about powerful women is clear, and she aptly records the lengths they would go to in order
to overcome their societal boundaries: “There were all kinds of madness, she supposes, and hers was daring to dream.”
An energetic and bold tale of one of history’s most enterprising journalists.
BLOOD SUGAR
Rothchild, Sascha Putnam (336 pp.) $27.00 | April 19, 2022 978-0-593-33154-5
People keep dying around Ruby Simon, but she insists that doesn’t mean she’s always guilty. Should we take a confessed killer at her word? Readers horrified by the opening scene, in which 5-year-old Ruby murders her 7-year-old schoolmate Duncan Reese, will soon be assured that it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Duncan was spoiled and mean and bullied Ruby’s sister, so her actions were excusable, if not heroic—at least in her eyes. The same can later be said of her friend’s predatory father and an awful therapy client nicknamed “the Witch,” both of whom meet their unfortunate demises with Ruby’s assistance. When Ruby’s husband dies, however, she insists she had nothing to do with it. Detective Keith Jackson disagrees, and he’s determined to find out why bodies keep piling up around Ruby. They face off, each attempting to outsmart the other, while Ruby regales readers with her side of the story. Sprinkled throughout are clues suggesting Ruby may not be the empathetic vigilante she pretends to be. “I waited for guilt to set in. But it never did,” she says about the first murder. In college, she majors in psychology hoping for some insight into her own behavior, and when she meets her monstrously narcissistic future mother-in-law, she wonders if perhaps they’re a little too much alike. Rothchild gives readers an unreliable narrator who truly lives up to the moniker. Is Ruby a sociopath or isn’t she? Was Jason’s death an accident, or did someone murder him? The answers are anything but straightforward.
A compelling and entertaining psychological thriller.
THE INVESTIGATOR
Sandford, John Putnam (400 pp.) $29.00 | April 12, 2022 978-0-593-32868-2
A domestic-terrorist plot gives the adopted daughter of storied U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport her moment to shine. Veteran oilman Vermilion Wright knows that losing a few thousand gallons of crude is no more than an accounting error to his company but could mean serious money to whomever’s found a way to siphon it off from wells in Texas’ Permian Basin. So he asks Sen. Christopher Colles, Chair of Homeland Security and Government Affairs, to look into it, and Colles persuades 24-year-old Letty Davenport, who’s just quit his employ, to return and partner with Department of Homeland Security agent John Kaiser to track down the thieves. The plot that right-winger Jane Jael Hawkes and her confederates, most of them service veterans with disgruntled attitudes and excellent military skills, have hatched is more dire than anything Wright could have imagined. They plan to use the proceeds from the oil thefts to purchase some black-market C4 essential to a major act of terrorism that will simultaneously express their alarm about the country’s hospitality to illegal immigrants and put the Jael-Birds on the map for good. But they haven’t reckoned with Letty, another kid born on the wrong side of the tracks who can outshoot the men she’s paired with and outthink the vigilantes she finds herself facing—and who, along with her adoptive father, makes a memorable pair of “pragmatists. Really harsh pragmatists” willing to do whatever needs doing without batting an eye or losing a night’s sleep afterward.
Generations may succeed generations, but Sandford’s patented investigation/action formula hasn’t aged a whit. Bring it on.
A HOUSE BETWEEN EARTH AND THE MOON
Scherm, Rebecca Viking (400 pp.) $27.00 | March 29, 2022 978-1-10-198010-1
Near-future Earth is in deep trouble. The humanity-saving space station isn’t looking so good either. Scherm’s second novel, after Unbecoming (2015), is a high-concept domestic novel that merges science fiction and eco-fiction tropes while braiding a host of characters and subplots. The main one involves Alex, a beleaguered scientist who has long been hoping to create a species of algae that can consume enough carbon dioxide to stem global warming. That crisis is racing out of control by 2033, when the novel is largely set, from constant wildfires to Midwestern heat waves that kill tens of thousands at a time. Alex has been recruited by Sensus, a Google/Apple–ish megacorp, to do his research on Parallaxis I, a space station orbiting Earth that’s designed partly for research, partly as an escape hatch for billionaires looking to get away from the chaos down below. Alex’s thoughts are earthbound, though: He’s recently separated from his wife, and his teenage daughter, Mary Agnes, is suffering rounds of cyberbullying and deepfake revenge porn facilitated by Sensus products. Added into this drama are Tess, a researcher hired to perfect an algorithm monitoring the behavior of Alex and Parallaxis’ other occupants, and the two sisters who run Sensus, often in a contentious relationship. And more: other scientists, family members, and billionaire occupants grumpy over delays and cost overruns. It’s all a lot—too much, really, for a novel that works the familiar theme that a change of scenery won’t erase our flaws. But credit Scherm for striving to give the climate change novel a wider yet still realistic scope and for creating some nuanced characters in Alex and Mary Agnes, who are both eager to do the right thing but undone by humanity, its fickle nature, and its allegedly liberating but often self-imprisoning technologies.
An ambitious, sometimes cumbersome dystopian tale.
THE PRINCE
Smith, Dinitia Arcade (288 pp.) $26.99 | March 1, 2022 978-1-950994-19-9
A retelling in contemporary Manhattan of the romantic quadrangle from Henry James’ The Golden Bowl. Like James, Smith opens with a prenup, signaling the tangle of relationships that antedate the marriage in question. Henry, a wealthy widower, is giving away his only daughter, Emily, to Federico, an Italian prince with few euros to his name. Federico, unbeknownst to Emily, preceded their romance with a serious affair in the arms of Christina, who knew Emily in boarding school and is invited to her wedding. Not coincidentally, Christina and Henry eventually connect and marry, while she and Federico reopen their affair. Even married, Emily remains deeply attached to Daddy, who buys her and the prince a house three blocks from his own Manhattan mansion. “Are you with me so far?” as the Eagles ask in “Life in the Fast Lane.” The plot moves inexorably toward the discovery of infidelity, borrowing “some of the storyline and the structure” of the James masterwork, as Smith writes in an endnote. She avoids James’ painstaking psychological dissections in favor of mullings in the close third person. And she largely avoids letting this frazzled quartet’s shenanigans degenerate into soap opera. But the novel suffers from repetitions, clunky prose, and a tendency to tell rather than show. Emily’s “full” breasts appear three times over five pages. Two women have “immaculate” posture (Christina and Federico’s mother—hmm). Emily, speaking of Daddy, refers to “the immeasurable greatness of his soul” and a few pages later to “his great, all-knowing arms.” Pity the prince:
winter love
“Around Henry, Federico was literally tongue-tied.” Henry has other problems: He has “no function,” “no skills, no talents,” “no job, no obligations.” Some of this reflects a lack of subtlety, not least in Smith’s update of James’ symbolic golden bowl as a Roman jar for collecting tears.
A story of rich potential that falls short in the execution.
WINTER LOVE
Suyin, Han McNally Editions (160 pp.) $18.00 | Feb. 8, 2022 978-1-946022-25-7
Decades after a collegiate romance, a woman looks back at the pivotal Sapphic encounter of her youth.
It’s winter 1944 in London, and Bettina, known as Red—thanks to her fiery hair color—has a crush on Mara. Newly enrolled at the Horsham Science College, where Red studies zoology, the elegant, married Mara easily accepts Red’s invitation to partner in a cat dissection. An infatuation grows, Mara invites Red to her impressive flat to bathe, leading to Red’s first run-in with Mara’s gruff husband, Karl. Similarly to many casually coupled-up women they observe at the height of World War II, neither Mara nor Red sees any appeal in the opposite sex, longing only for each other. When Karl departs to Europe for business, the two women are free to explore their enchantment with each other, immediately becoming domestic partners and, as they both recognize out loud, lesbians. Since the story is presented as a reminiscence of “Mara’s winter” by an older, married Red, who remembers this season, “its substance, the wrench of its happiness like a pain, an ecstasy,” the reader knows the couple is doomed early on. Still, the progression of their intimate connection, interwoven with Red’s coming-of-age, is entertaining. When Red visits her single Aunt Muriel for Christmas, Red’s ex-lover, Rhoda, is also invited, since she was included in past celebrations as a dear friend and roommate. The fauxfriend trope rings true, as do, perhaps sadly, several others, as
Red’s story offers peeks into several versions of not-so-covert lesbian life in the 1940s. “We agreed that each human being was both male and female, and anyone who denied both sides in themselves was lying,” Red and Mara conclude at the height of their romance. For the contemporary reader, this novel, originally published in 1962, feels like an astute observation on how compulsory heterosexuality has impacted and stifled society for generations.
A rumination on a life that could have been, this novel encapsulates queer history often left untold.
I WAS THE PRESIDENT’S MISTRESS!!
Syjuco, Miguel Farrar, Straus and Giroux (384 pp.) $30.00 | April 5, 2022 978-0-3741-7405-7
The woman at the center of the Philippines’ political upheaval tells all. Vita Nova is a pop-music and movie star with 20.2 million Instagram followers, and she has a lot to say to the offscreen interviewer about Philippine politics. She was, as the title says, a girlfriend of President Fernando Valdes Estregan, a hard-liner not dissimilar to real-life strongman Rodrigo Duterte. But Syjuco’s second novel does more than consider Vita a paramour: She’s at the center of stories the country tells itself about religion, relationships, journalism, and politics. The novel is structured around transcripts of interviews between Vita and about a dozen of the men in her life: a Catholic bishop, a Muslim political leader, a DJ, a journalist, a U.S. naval officer, and more. Because Vita has strong opinions about the country— and everybody has strong opinions about her—the novel has a headlong, assertive energy and a transgressive bent. (A content warning at the opening of the book isn’t kidding: Characters spew all manner of homophobic, Islamophobic, and sexist rhetoric.) Over the course of the novel, shifts in the political atmosphere—up to and including assassination—wind up putting Vita closer to the country’s destiny than she had expected. And with each interviewee, Philippine culture is revealed as more tragicomically corrupt. (A gluttonous warlord proclaims over a long meal: “We Christians would never commit such excess— Aha! Our sixth course!”) And the references to fake news, law and order, impeachment, and more make clear that we’re not just talking about the Philippines. The interview-transcript format stifles the novel’s arc somewhat, and everybody’s chatty tendencies wind up dragging the novel, despite its exclamatory provocations. But Syjuco’s most irreverent set pieces reveal how cultures can get a woman like Vita exactly backward— rather than the know-nothing sinner she’s dismissed as, she’s the scapegoat for everyone else’s greed and ineptitude.
An ingenious if exceedingly chatty yarn about scandalstruck society.
THE CHERRY ROBBERS
Walker, Sarai Harper/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $27.00 | May 17, 2022 978-0-358-25187-3
From the author of Dietland (2015), a 1950s gothic, complete with a haunted mansion, a controlling older man, a bevy of dying girls, and a heroine who escapes. Sylvia Wren, a rich and famous painter, has a secret: She’s actually Iris Chapel, heiress to the Chapel Firearms fortune, who escaped as her father was driving her to a psych ward 60 years earlier. When a journalist threatens to reveal her identity, Sylvia decides to take control of her own narrative by writing a memoir (this novel). Iris is the fifth of the six tragic Chapel sisters, born in the 1930s, all named for flowers, about whom the village children make up a rhyme: “The Chapel sisters: / first they get married / then they get buried.” The girls grow up in a gloomy Connecticut mansion nicknamed the wedding cake with a stern, traditional father and a cold mother, Belinda, who believes she’s haunted by the ghosts of people killed by Chapel guns. Their maternal grandmother, Rose, and Rose’s mother died in childbirth, traumas that echo down the generations in the form of an apparent curse. Again and again Belinda smells roses and announces that something terrible is going to happen—and soon after, it does. Typically, the “something terrible” takes the form of a Chapel sister having sex with a man for the first time, then shrieking, laughing, smashing a window, and dropping dead. Although this novel skips from the 1950s to the 2010s without engaging with the feminist movement of the 20th century that made freedom possible for artists like Sylvia, Walker makes it clear—through heavy-handed symbols and explicit thematic statements—that she considers this a feminist story. “I’ve finally come to realize that it’s my destiny to be one of the madwomen. One of the women who speaks the truth no matter how terrifying it might be. One of the women who stands apart from the crowd,” Sylvia writes. She escapes her sisters’ fate by never having sex with a man (she’s a lesbian), by running away to New Mexico, by becoming an artist famous for vulvar flower paintings that sell for “an obscene amount of money.” (“In the world of The Cherry Robbers, Georgia O’Keeffe does not exist, and Sylvia Wren occupies (some of) that space,” Walker writes in an author’s note.)
Distinctly drawn characters make the book readable, but it lacks the ambiguity and intensity of really good gothics.
black cake
BLACK CAKE
Wilkerson, Charmaine Ballantine (400 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 1, 2022 978-0-593-35833-7
Siblings called together after their mother’s death learn that almost everything they know about their Caribbeanborn parents is a lie. On an unnamed island in 1965, a bride throws herself into the ocean after her much older gangster husband drops dead at their wedding reception and is never again seen in her village. (She is, however, a very good swimmer.) In Southern California in 2018, Byron and his sister, Benny, are called to listen to an audio file their mother spent days making for them. Estranged for years, they resist, asking for a copy to take home, but their mother’s lawyer (who also seems to be grieving) says their mother was very specific, telling them, “There are things your mother wanted you to hear right away, things you need to know.” Are there ever. The threads connecting the alternating sections of the book, “Then” and “Now,” are many, and tangled, and somehow just keep getting more complicated as the pages roll by. The complex plotting of this novel, unfurling over decades and continents, and the careful pacing of its reveals, often in very short, almost epigrammatic chapters, are enticing. But the pacing is overly slowed by endless lingering inside the heads of characters recapping, reviewing, and agonizing over their predicaments. You want to be tapping your toe with suspense, not fraying patience. And while the island-born characters introduced in the “Then” part of the book are deliciously larger than life, with outsized talents, shortcomings, and powers of self-reinvention, the backstories and concerns of the “Now” characters feel consciously assembled to touch bases of gender and racial identity, domestic abuse, political consciousness, climate change, etc. Nonetheless, Wilkerson is clearly an author to watch.
There is plenty to savor in this ambitious and accomplished debut.
THINGS PAST TELLING
Williams, Sheila Amistad/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $25.99 | March 15, 2022 978-0-06-309707-0
Freed from slavery, an indomitable woman narrates her century of life. This sweeping novel begins with its narrator, Momma Grace, living in Ohio with her family five years after the end of the Civil War. She’s a formerly enslaved woman, at least a century old, and she has a remarkable story to tell. She begins at the beginning, with her golden childhood in West Africa, an idyll cut short when slave traders kidnap the girl called Little Bird and one of her older sisters. Williams skillfully gives the reader a child’s-eye view of the confusion and cruelty of being marched for days to be loaded onto a ship for the Middle Passage. But Little Bird’s life soon takes another surprising turn, one that will be largely good luck for her. The ship is raided by a pirate crew led by a formerly enslaved captain called Caesar, and he quickly notices Little Bird’s facility for languages. Renamed Maryam, she becomes his translator and spy, and also, on a remote island where his crew’s families live, she becomes apprentice to a midwife and healer. That luck doesn’t hold; after a few years she ends up in the slave markets and begins a long life of bondage. The skills she learned on Caesar’s island make her particularly valuable—when she’s sent to deliver babies, White and Black, and to treat the sick, it’s the slave master who collects the pay for her services. As she is sold from one plantation to another, she forms warm friendships and romances, even marrying once (although it’s illegal for the enslaved to marry). She has several children and, one way or another, loses most of them—some of them sold away by her enslavers, who see their slaves’ children as commodities. Momma Grace’s story is often a brutal one, but it’s full of adventure and romance, courage and resilience. It’s no apologia for slavery but a moving portrait of its fully human victims.
A woman tells of her long, rich life and the terrible impact upon her of slavery.
mystery
SEDATING ELAINE
Winter, Dawn Knopf (272 pp.) $27.00 | April 12, 2022 978-0-593-32054-9
A woman must navigate the demands of her sexually voracious girlfriend while staying one step ahead of her drug dealer’s terrifying enforcers, Betty and the Ladies. Frances owes money to her dealer, Dom. She has one week to pay up or else he’ll have no choice but to call in his enforcer, Betty, who does horrifying things with a straightening iron to encourage payment. To make matters worse, Frances’ new girlfriend, Elaine, has become so demanding of her time that Frances has determined to dump her, just as soon as she can get a word in edgewise. But when Dom delivers a warning directly to Frances’ flat, she realizes that desperate times call for desperate measures. In exchange for monthly rent, Frances invites the irrepressible Elaine to move in with her, an agreement to which Elaine enthusiastically agrees. Frances is an emotionally stunted character, still grieving the breakup of her relationship with the woman she believes to be the love of her life, still suffering from her mother’s childhood abandonment, so overwhelmed by the world that she has stayed in the same dishwashing job for years because the routine brings a numbing escape from her feelings. In spite of Frances’ truculence, Elaine—who is bouncy, bubbly, raunchy, and desperately needy—is head over heels in love and sets about remaking Frances in the image of someone capable of loving her back. After only a day or so of cohabitation, Frances has had enough. She embarks on a plan to keep Elaine quiet—with the help of a sedative procured by Dom and slipped into Elaine’s cinnamon latte. When this plan goes predictably wrong, Frances is forced to confront the demons of her own past as she runs from the iron-wielding harpies of her future. The result is an eager, slightly unwieldy novel that suffers from its tendency to slip into an expository style. Frances’ reluctance to engage with her girlfriend often slides into outright cruelty, and the fun the book pokes at the expense of Elaine’s frank and overambitious sexuality mirrors that cruelty rather than diffusing or justifying it. A turn at the end seeks to ratify this dynamic, but it is too little too late to redeem “Funny Frances,” as Elaine calls her, who seems willing to let almost anything happen to the people around her if it buys her a little more time to stew on her own hurt feelings.
Brash and engaging on the sentence level but fails to create empathy for a main character who feels none herself.
THE VANISHING TYPE
Adams, Ellery Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | April 26, 2022 978-1-4967-2644-5
The members of The Secret, Book, and Scone Society tangle with a killer who strikes close to home. Though all the members have survived troubling times in their lives only to become stronger in their sisterhood, one of them is still hiding a secret that stirs up a killer. Miracle Springs, North Carolina, bookstore owner Nora Pennington strives to pick the perfect reading material for her customers
while dispensing delicious drinks and bakery products created by her friend Hester Winthrop. Hester is soon to be engaged to Deputy Jasper Andrews, and Nora herself has fallen for Sheriff Grant McCabe. As she’s busy planning special events for Valentine’s Day, Nora is upset to discover copies of The Scarlet Letter with the name Hester scraped off, and Hester is puzzled to find an odd book left in her bakeshop. When a man is found dead with a similar book in his pocket, it proves to be one of a series about successful women written in an era slow to approve of working women. The murdered man isn’t identified until Hester confesses a long-buried connection. Soon, more volumes turn up, and research into them by Nora’s librarian friend, Bobbie, provides clues to the mystery that put the sleuths on the road to a ruthless killer.
The winding path to the truth showcases both the strengths and the weaknesses of the loving sisterhood.
CLAWS FOR SUSPICION
Blake, Deborah Berkley (288 pp.) $8.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-593-20154-1
Murder most foul is far from the worst development animal shelter owner Kari Stuart has to face in her third appearance. The first thing that goes wrong is the sudden appearance of her ex-husband, developer and investment adviser Charlie Smith, who informs her that he’s not her ex after all; she never signed the forms finalizing their decree, so technically they’re still married, and he’s entitled to half the $5 million lottery payout that financed Serenity Sanctuary. Nor can she buy him off with a mere $2.5 million: He’s determined to tear down the shelter, replace it with a glamping facility that will attract wealthy clients who crave both glamour and camping, and share the profits with Kari, who he assumes will take him back. In fact, he’s already signed a contract with investor James Torrance, who’s fronted him a bundle on the strength of his assurances that Kari’s fully on board. By the time Kari learns that either Charlie or Torrance has forged her signature to the requisite paperwork and that Torrance is prepared to sue her to honor her nonexistent commitment, Charlie is dead of mushroom poisoning. Since Kari unwillingly had drinks with him at a local craft brewery the night before his decease and invited him for a showdown brunch that he departed prematurely the next morning, she’s squarely in the sights of Sheriff Dan Richardson. When Kari phones Charlie’s mother, Shirley Smith, to offer her condolences, her unloving ex-mother-in-law demands that she find out the truth. No pressure there.
Not many surprises in the interminable windup, but Kari’s narration is pleasantly unflappable under duress.
MURDER MOST VILE
Brown, Eric Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | April 5, 2022 978-0-7278-5099-7
A missing artist, a missing greyhound, and murder: The game’s afoot! London, 1957. The crackerjack detective team of Donald Langham and Ralph Ryland tackle two baffling disappearances along parallel tracks. In the better-paying one, wealthy, distraught Vernon Lombard implores Langham to find his missing son, Christopher, a renowned artist. The case is time-sensitive because Lombard is dying and wants to leave his estate to Christopher and not his other son, Nigel, a ne’er-do-well. A phone call from Lombard’s daughter, Victoria, comes as a surprise to the sleuths, since Lombard’s emotional account of family dynamics didn’t even mention a daughter. She offers a far less sympathetic portrait of her father. Meanwhile, Ryland, a devoted fan of greyhound racing, learns that valuable dog Neb (short for Nebuchadnezzar) has been nipped, probably by “some Essex mob.” He sets out to find Neb and return him to owner Arnold Grayson, a decidedly shady character. In the Lombard case, fully fleshed portraits of the suspects-to-be, which include extended family and associates, prepare the way for the inevitable murder. The solution has intriguing roots in contemporaneous British history. Meanwhile, Ryland scours London’s meanest streets in his efforts to recover the beloved Neb. Could these two plots possibly converge? Brown’s doubledecker mystery benefits greatly from the contrast between the two investigations, a traditional whodunit set in a patrician world counterpointed with a thrilling caper among the hardscrabble working class. Brisk dialogue and colorful, crisply drawn characters keep interest high.
A sleek, smart, well-appointed period mystery.
ISLAND OF TIME
Bunn, Davis Severn House (208 pp.) $28.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-44830-844-6
An anti-magic cop in an anti-magic country gets sucked into a plot pitting established magicians against insurgent magicians. Called to the scene of a fatal fire, recently widowed Interpol agent Jackson Burnett finds every indication that Bernard Bouchon, the wealthy head of a timepiece manufacturing firm, and his wife, who runs her own interior design company, have perished along with their two children. But the forensic evidence soon vanishes more or less before the variably observant eyes of Jackson and Luca Tami, the blind Talent who’s been seconded from Brussels to help him. Luca, who can see a lot of things Jackson’s
three tainted teas
eyes miss, tells him that their records of the deaths will disappear soon, along with their memories of the incident. Interpol’s remit has changed quite a bit since the 21st century—it’s now “tasked with policing magic and Talents, those gifted in the arcane arts”—so Jackson’s an obvious candidate to investigate the case. Not so his friend Simeon Baehr, a straight-arrow detective from Geneva’s serious crimes division. So Jackson asks his boss if he and Luca can be joined by Inspector Krys Duprey, an Egyptian Canadian Ethiopian Interpol prodigy who turns out to be another Talent herself, and they go up against the forces intent on taking down the seven Institutes of Magic. Switzerland has outlawed magic for 700 years, but such bans have merely driven the Institutes underground, not put them out of business, and veteran Bunn supplies scene after scene of otherworldly combat and conscientiously expository dialogue. Alert readers will quickly sort out the hierarchy that puts Acolytes below Talents, then Adepts, then Directors; others will be dragged along in bemusement.
A wild ride clogged by a surfeit of explanations on the fly.
THREE TAINTED TEAS
Cahoon, Lynn Kensington (288 pp.) $8.99 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-4967-3033-6
A kitchen witch reluctantly takes over as planner for a cursed wedding. Magic Springs, Idaho, is home to both Mia Malone’s catering service and cooking school and a large coven of witches. Bethanie, a frenemy of Christina Adams, Mia’s housemate, is a bridesmaid at the upcoming wedding. The union of Amethyst Uzzi, who’s from a prominent witch family, and Tok McMann, who’s a shape-shifting wolf, is already problematic before Bethanie ropes in Christina as a substitute bridesmaid because she’s the same size as the woman who pulled out. When wedding planner Chelsea Bachman is fired, the Uzzi family calls on Mia to take her place at the festivities, which are happening in just a week’s time. The job turns into a nightmare that Mia’s huge paycheck doesn’t begin to justify because Chelsea, and perhaps an unknown accomplice, are doing everything they can to sabotage the wedding. When Mia goes to Chelsea’s room at the Lodge—the hotel where the wedding is taking place and where she’s been staying—in search of contracts for items like flowers and the wedding cake, many of which Chelsea had canceled, she finds her predecessor ripped to pieces. Because the local detective doesn’t believe in witches or shape-shifters, Mia realizes that she must use her prior experience to find the killer. With only their boyfriends to protect them, Mia and Christina depend on magic to keep them alive.
Although the killer may be spotted early, this witchy tale is a hoot.
DOUBLE SHOT DEATH
Duncan, Emmeline Kensington (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-4967-3341-2
What seems like a great opportunity turns into an Oregon barista’s nightmare. Big news: Sage Caplin and Harley Yamazaki, partners in Ground Rules coffee company, are about to expand the two carts they own to a store. Plus, a lastminute cancellation has given Sage the coffee provider spot at the Campathon Music Festival on a farm outside Portland. Sage and her boyfriend, Bax, a video game designer, plan to make this a working vacation. They’re barely parked when drama erupts between some of the other participants. As the first coffee drinkers arrive, it’s clear that there are bad feelings between singer Maya Oliveira, who does songs for Bax’s videos, and Nate Green, the frontman for the Changelings, a band represented by Ian Rabe. Maya wrote many of the songs on the Changelings album but so far has received neither money not credit. When Sage stumbles upon Ian’s body, it brings back bad memories of a murder case in which she was a suspect. Sage tells Detective Adams about her unfortunate find and describes the people she saw in the vicinity, annoying her lawyer brother, who’s also attending the festival, for saying anything without consulting him. As the festival goes on, Sage picks up a great deal of gossip while serving coffee and notices a few things that strike her as odd. But it takes a while until the penny drops and she realizes who killed Ian.
A clever sleuth, music trivia, and plenty of West Coast vibes add up to an enjoyable read.
A MARGIN FOR MURDER
Elliott, Lauren Kensington (304 pp.) $8.99 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-4967-3513-3
A Massachusetts bookstore owner takes on yet another case of murder. Inheriting her aunt’s Victorian home in Greyborne Harbor enabled Addie Greyborne to open Beyond the Page. While she waits in hope that Dr. Simon Emerson will present her with an engagement ring for her birthday, Addie heads off with her assistant, Paige Stringer, to nearby Pen Hollow, where the library is closing. The building, which is slated for demolition, contains not only plenty of books, but also some amazing old furniture that Mayor Luella Higgins tells them is all for sale, along with the bookmobile. Addie buys the furniture and the bookmobile, which turns out to contain several valuable first editions donated by benefactor Maisie Radcliff that had previously gone missing. She soon realizes that plenty of people don’t approve of closing the library, and when Luella
dies in what’s clearly not an accident, there are suspects galore. One of them is bestselling author Anthony Radcliff, Maisie’s grandson and Addie’s high school crush. When the local sheriff fastens on outsiders Addie and Paige as his best suspects, since Luella was poisoned at a dinner they attended, Simon and Greyborne Harbor Police Chief Marc Chandler have a tough time keeping them out of jail. Of course Addie ignores all requests to leave the case to the police and digs up plenty of gossip and evidence pointing to the killer.
Nicely fits the cozy formula, with plenty of specialized knowledge, local color, and romance.
AND BY FIRE
Hawtrey, Evie Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $26.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-64385-993-4
A series of increasingly scary blazes in contemporary London is linked to the most storied fire in the city’s history. The only casualty in the first fire, at the monument commemorating the Great Fire of 1666, is a wooden sculpture the witness who finds it mistakes for a dead man. But the second ups the ante by claiming the life of randy solicitor Andrew Smyth, whose corpse is recognized by its distinctive necktie. Working with her Met counterpart, DI Colm O’Leary, the City of London’s DI Nigella Parker, nicknamed “the moth” because of her fascination with fires, painstakingly follows every clue— but they lead either to dead ends, like office cleaner Nelson Taylor, who stops sputtering long enough to provide a most convincing alibi, or to the year of the Great Fire. Meanwhile, Hawtrey, not content to invoke the past through thematic and geographical parallels, intertwines her primary investigation with a second story: the fate of Margaret Dove, Maid of Honour to Queen Catherine Braganza, who begins 1666 by falling in love with Etienne Belland, who makes fireworks for Catherine’s husband, King Charles II, and then, after witnessing the Great Fire from an agonizingly intimate position, begins to suspect a most unlikely perpetrator. Although the author acknowledges in an afterword that the Great Fire was almost certainly started by accident, readers swept up in this double-barreled inferno will forget the history they know as they root for both heroines to bring the malefactors to book before things get even hotter.
The ambitious, audacious rewriting of the historical record will linger long after the routine tale of present-day arson.
POPPY HARMON AND THE BACKSTABBING BACHELOR
Hollis, Lee Kensington (272 pp.) $26.00 | April 26, 2022 978-1-4967-3040-4
What seems like a simple case thrusts Palm Springs private eye Poppy Harmon and her associates at the Desert Flowers Detective Agency into danger. Poppy, a retired actress, reinvented herself as a detective when her husband died and left her penniless, and even though she’s good at it, she had to hire an aspiring actor named Matt to play agency head Matt Flowers in order to be taken seriously. In her latest case, she disguises herself as a woman in her 90s in order to flush out a gang of grifters preying on the elderly. Since their last case landed Matt an acting gig in Europe, Poppy and her friends Iris and Violet are on their own when the boyfriend of one of the grifters starts stalking Poppy. Then she loans her car to a neighbor, who’s run off the road—a sure sign that the stalker’s out for blood. When Poppy finds the stalker’s lair, he escapes but leaves behind plenty of evidence. Apparently he’s a lot like the talented Mr. Ripley, a man with many identities, and he seems to have a fascination with TV reality star Jessie Walters, who’s preparing to headline the new show My Dream Man. Despite Poppy’s best efforts, Jessie and her manager don’t believe that she’s in danger. When the stalker bombs Poppy’s house, she pretends to have been killed and schemes to get Matt on the show as one of the dream men, disguising herself as his elderly aunt and adviser. Now all they have to do is uncover which of the contestants is the killer.
Plenty of quirky characters enhance this compelling display of bravery in the face of danger.
BEAR WITNESS
Jensen, Lark O. Crooked Lane (320 pp.) $26.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-64385-896-8
Prolific dog mystery/adventure/ romance author Linda O. Johnston takes on a new pseudonym to launch her Alaska Untamed Mystery series. As she’s eager to tell everyone, Stacie Calder isn’t just a tour guide; she’s a trained naturalist who has a lot more experience and wisdom than Lettie Amblex, her 10-years-younger assistant aboard the ClemElk. So it’s no surprise when sharp-eyed Stacie sees Sheldon Truit, a former ClemElk deckhand returning as a tourist, trying to chat up Capt. Palmer Clementos or when Truit, rebuffed by the captain, turns to Stacie asking if she might consider joining him in a rival tour company he’s thinking of launching. The launch doesn’t get very far, though, because Truit promptly disappears from the ship (Stacie’s naturally the first one to notice
give unto others
that he’s missing) and is soon found half submerged on a beach on the fjord Tracy Arm. Whodunit? There are lots of potential suspects, but most of them don’t register because Stacie is so intent on her amatory pursuit of Alaska State Trooper Liam Amaruq that she has little attention to spare for either the tourists who are paying her salary or the natural wonders that presumably attracted those tourists in the first place. Instead, she methodically considers one suspect after another but shoots each one down in her mind with a rapid volley of questions. No fear: One of them—it really doesn’t matter which one—will turn out to be guilty, and Stacie’s fears that if the case were solved, “I doubted I’d ever see this trooper again” seem premature.
A little bit of everything but not very much of anything.
GIVE UNTO OTHERS
Leon, Donna Atlantic Monthly (304 pp.) $27.00 | March 15, 2022 978-0-8021-5940-3
Things are slow at the Questura— perhaps there’s less crime in Venice since the pandemic is keeping tourists away?— so Commissario Guido Brunetti has plenty of time to look into something that’s been troubling an old neighbor.
Brunetti had never really liked Elisabetta Foscarini when they briefly lived in the same building as teenagers, but her mother was kind to him, and more important, she was kind to his mother, who was raising a family with far less money than the Foscarinis. So when Elisabetta comes to see him at the Questura, telling him she’s worried about her daughter, Flora, a veterinarian, Brunetti decides to look into it unofficially. Flora’s husband, Enrico, is an accountant, and apparently he’s been acting funny lately and told Flora it could be dangerous if people found out about something having to do with his work. Enrico helped Elisabetta’s husband, Bruno, set up a charity several years earlier, and since then he’s been working for a number of small clients. With the help of the usual crew—Commissario Claudia Griffoni, Ispettore Lorenzo Vianello, and the crafty secretary Signorina Elettra Zorzi, who Brunetti is finally prepared to admit (to himself) actually breaks the law in her pursuit of information—Brunetti sets out to interview Enrico’s clients and the people involved in Bruno’s charity. Then Flora finds her clinic broken into and a dog injured: Is it a warning? This book is classic Leon: Brunetti is less focused on any actual crime than on figuring out whether some other unknown crime has been committed, whether he himself is doing something wrong by using official resources on an unofficial investigation, whether the ends of finding information he needs justifies Signorina Elletra’s shadowy means of procuring it: “His opinion of that, he knew, had changed in the last few years, and he had grown more suspicious of the desire to expand the limits of the permissible.”
Still the next best thing to moving to Venice.
IDLE GOSSIP
Patrick, Renee Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-72785-049-2
Summer 1940 finds costume designer Edith Head and her pal Lillian Frost doing some snooping that’s beneath even gossip columnist Lorna Whitcomb. “Eyes on Hollywood,” Lorna’s column, relies on material gathered by her legman, Sam Simcoe, and Sam relies on information dispensed by tipsters like Glenn Hoyle. When Glenn is beaten to death and Sam, who’s lurking conveniently nearby, is arrested for his murder, Lorna, fearing that her well may go dry, asks Edith and Lillian, who’ve acquired a certain reputation as investigators, to nose around in her place and find enough evidence to pin the tail on some different donkey. The two friends aren’t exactly hurting for activities. Edith has just been promoted to head of Paramount’s wardrobe department, and Lillian’s work as social secretary for wealthy, star-struck retired industrialist Addison Rice fills her days with resplendently obnoxious characters like Englishman Freddy Sewell, who was formerly employed (can you believe it?) by producer/director Alexander Korda. Even so, they agree to track down information about three people Hoyle evidently dug up dirt on: silent film director Vernon Reynolds, who’s now the maître d’ at Arturo’s; Mephistophelian wannabe producer Earl Lymangood; and Delia Carson, America’s sweetheart, who’s outraged her stage mother, Rhoda, by up and marrying bit player Arthur Davis. The pair manage to unearth the three targets’ not very interesting secrets with insulting ease, but learning what Hoyle knew doesn’t get them any closer to telling them who killed him. Nor does it prevent a second murder. Luckily, walk-ons by the likes of Orson Welles, Preston Sturges, and Barbara Stanwyck keep things lively.
The mystery is no more than serviceable, but the chatter, much of it based on fact, makes this rehash of the past shine.
THE MARLOW MURDER CLUB
Thorogood, Robert Poisoned Pen (304 pp.) $16.99 paper | May 3, 2022 978-1-72825-051-9
The creator of the Death in Paradise series (Murder in the Caribbean, 2018, etc.) crafts a triple-decker puzzle in a Thamesside English village. When crossword compiler Judith Potts hears a shout and a bang from the yard of neighboring art gallery owner Stefan Dunwoody, she’s convinced he’s been shot. But DS Tanika Malik, of the Maidenhead Police Station, brushes off her report as a likely car backfire. Next morning, when Judith finds her neighbor shot in the head, Malik naturally says his death was probably an accident
