25 minute read
MECCA by Susan Straight
mecca
MECCA
Straight, Susan Farrar, Straus and Giroux (384 pp.) $28.00 | March 15, 2022 978-0-3746-0451-6
Is Susan Straight the bard of Southern California literature? In her eighth novel—she has also written a memoir and a collection of linked stories as well as a book for young readers—the author stakes her claim. A sweeping and kaleidoscopic work, it begins (how could it not?) on the freeway, “a Thursday in October,” a highway patrol officer named Johnny Frias tells us. “Santa Ana winds, ninety-four degrees. Fire weather. People were three layers of pissed off. Everyone hated Thursday. Wednesday was hump day, but Thursday was when people drove like they wanted to kill each other.” Johnny is one of several protagonists in Straight’s novel, which flows from first to third person and life to life as if to embody the instability of the region it evokes. The notion of Southern California as elusive, beset by wind and traffic, is hardly a new one; it infuses the work of writers such as Joan Didion and Carolyn See. Straight, however, is operating in a different register, one attuned less to Los Angeles than to the sprawl that surrounds it, extending into the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley. Her focus, as it has long been, is on people to whom the stereotypes of sun and speed and reinvention do not apply. Here, that means not only Johnny, but also Ximena, an undocumented domestic worker, and Matelasse, whose husband leaves her with two young sons not long before the Covid-19 pandemic begins. “Black acres of sandy field,” Straight describes the landscape, “the corral where his grandfather’s horses and the bull named Coalmine used to live. Then the arroyo, and the foothills.”
This is a novel that pushes back against the clichés of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.
SMALL ODYSSEYS Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Stories
Ed. by Tinti, Hannah Algonquin (336 pp.) $19.95 paper | March 15, 2022 978-1-64375-199-3
A wide-ranging anthology of original stories from some of today’s top authors. If you’re a public radio stan and lover of fiction, you’ve likely heard of “Selected Shorts,” the program that features actors performing readings of a variety of short stories. Among the fans of the show is novelist Tinti, who edits this anthology sponsored by the program. The 35 original stories here are divided into three sections— “Departures,” “Journeys,” and “New Worlds”—and each has its share of delights. The first section starts off with Luis Alberto Urrea’s wonderful “The King of Bread,” about a fourth grade boy coping with the loss of his mother, who’s been forced by immigration authorities to leave the U.S. He navigates his relationship with his father, whose demeanor is “jolly rage,” with trepidation and care; both miss their family member but react to her leaving very differently. It’s a lovely, understated story and an excellent introduction to the anthology. The highlight of the second section is Omar El Akkad’s “A Survey of Recent American Happenings Told Through Six Commercials for the Tennyson ClearJet Premium Touchless Bidet,” a hilarious take on capitalism in the age of constant disaster. (“Tennyson Bidets: Life is but a grotesque carnival of unbearable pain,” ends one such commercial.) Addressing the Covid-19 pandemic directly is Victor LaValle in “Bedtime Story,” which sees a father and son in New York adjusting to life under quarantine. “The city that never sleeps,” the father reflects ruefully. “Well, that’s officially bullshit now.” The 8-year-old boy is suffering from depression and misses his mom, who’s left temporarily to take care of her own sick mother. The child insists his dad take him “camping”—in the hallway of their apartment building. The story ends on a hopeful note; like all of LaValle’s work, it’s beautiful and surprising. Anthologies like this are hard to pull off; not every story is going to land with every reader. But Tinti does a good job curating this one—thematically, it makes sense; the lineup is diverse; and it serves as a good introduction for readers looking for their next favorite fiction writer.
Well-curated, eclectic, and thoughtful.
THE GOOD LEFT UNDONE
Trigiani, Adriana Dutton (448 pp.) $28.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-18332-8
In the Italian coastal town of Viareggio, Matelda Cabrelli Roffo is at the last stage of her life, but the matriarch still has decades’ worth of family stories to share. On the eve of her 81st birthday, Matelda offers her 25-year-old granddaughter Anina the contents of her jewelry case, a family tradition for brides-to-be. Of course, Anina selects the one item Matelda isn’t ready to part with: a jewel-encrusted watch with a curiously upside-down facade. Matelda’s attachment to the treasure—a rare sentiment in the Cabrelli family of jewelers—leads to questions about its origins and the unfolding of a family timeline Anina’s never heard. In chapters alternating between the present and the nine decades leading up to Matelda’s demurring, the Cabrelli family history is deftly illustrated through a long chain of strong women. At just 11 years old, Matelda’s mother, Domenica Cabrelli, witnesses her best friend, Silvio, banished from Viareggio for being a fatherless troublemaker. Years later, Domenica, now a nurse, is exiled herself when the Catholic Church learns she’s offered family planning advice to a young mother in distress. She lands in a convent in Scotland, where she continues nursing and plans
to join the nunnery. Conveniently, love interrupts, and Domenica’s marriage to a Scottish naval captain derails her plans, as does Italy’s involvement in the war. With young Matelda in tow, Domenica longs for her hometown of Viareggio, a seaside paradise elderly Matelda cherishes until her last breath. Upon learning about the Cabrelli family struggles, sacrifices, and persistence, Anina changes, reconsidering the meaning of strength, family, and the types of love worth sacrificing for. Trigiani’s adept character portrayals, deliciously described settings, and carefully considered details build momentum and intrigue from beginning to end.
An epic multigenerational love story sweeping across coastal Italy, Southern France, and Scotland.
THE TOWN OF BABYLON
Varela, Alejandro Astra House (320 pp.) $27.00 | March 22, 2022 978-1-662-60103-3
A visit to his suburban hometown prompts a series of reckonings for Andres, a gay Latinx man. It’s been nearly 20 years since Andres, a professor of public health, exiled himself from Babylon—whose exact location debut author Varela leaves pointedly vague. Now, with his father recovering from surgery and his husband on a business trip in Namibia, he’s reluctantly returned. His marriage has been in crisis since he discovered his husband’s infidelity, and, back home in Babylon, he’s haunted by memories of his late brother, Henry. With few distractions besides his parents, immigrants who pride themselves on their hard work and unconditional love for their children, he decides to attend his 20th high school reunion, though not without some hesitation. His classmates represent, for Andres, everything he ran away from and swore never to return to: the drudgery of the White working class. Here a catalog of backstories unfolds in detail that is sometimes exhaustive and unnecessary. Andres meets Jeremy, a crush from high school with whom he’d become close friends and developed a romance. There’s also Paul, whose scrawniness—in Andres’ memory—was such a source of insecurity that he overcompensated by being loud and obnoxious and surly. Paul is now the minister of a storefront church, and Andres has not let go of his suspicion that he was responsible for a hate crime that killed a local gay man. The pressure on his marriage increases as Andres continues to see Jeremy after the reunion and as his past muddles any picture he’d had of his future. The secondary characters do have some life to them, but they sometimes feel like they’re stuck in the tropes Andres has cast them in. And while the novel’s achievement lies in its simultaneous depth and expansiveness—its huge ensemble of characters, the precision with which the landscape and culture of Andres’ hometown are rendered—it is sometimes overwritten, lapsing into heavy-handed social and political observation that falls short of revelation.
A sprawling, sometimes muddled bildungsroman.
YOUR NOSTALGIA IS KILLING ME
Weir, John Red Hen Press (224 pp.) $16.95 paper | April 26, 2022 978-1-63628-029-5
Weir’s linked collection of bittersweet, often witty stories elucidates almost 50 years in the life of a gay White man in the U.S., from enduring school taunts in 1970s New Jersey to experiencing the horrors of AIDS to that epidemic’s continuing reverberations for a scarred (and mostly HIV-positive) generation.
The first of the book’s three parts, harrowing and sometimes bitingly funny, centers on a narrator who’s the caretaker, nursemaid, and faithful sidekick to a friend—not a lover, but a beloved—who’s dying. Watching that friend waste away, enduring his hostile outbursts and caustic jokes, indulging his whims: Weir writes powerfully and with nuance about what it’s like to grieve someone into the grave and beyond and what it’s like to have that grief haunted and needled at and undermined, in a way, by how unpleasant and hateful the beloved became as his health deteriorated. The second section, “Long-Term Survivors,” follows this same narrator—his name is John Weir, a stratagem that sometimes seems clever but that can also feel coy—through the next 30 years. Two stories in this section feature his mother. A standout is “Humoresque,” in which the narrator, now in his 50s, has come down to Pennsylvania to check on his octogenarian mom, just out of the hospital after a brain bleed she wasn’t expected to recover from. She’s the kind of person often called indomitable, which (accurately) makes her seem formidable in the way of a battleship or a frosty screen idol; the narrator describes her as “a movie star without a movie to star in.” Their impatient, affectionate banter—she’s another big personality to be helpmeet to, co-star with, the narrator’s preferred (if also resented) role—is lovely and persuasive, and Weir uses it to illuminate what’s going on in the narrator’s love life; he’s here in part, as his perceptive mother intuits, to claim her car so he can drive north to pursue another of his doomed, barely or nonphysical love affairs with another inaccessible man.
Sharp, elegiac, angry, funny stories with a searing loneliness often just underneath the surface.
WHEN WE FELL APART
Wiley, Soon Dutton (368 pp.) $27.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-18514-8
Four young people with varied backgrounds struggle for acceptance in Seoul, one of them with tragic results.
Under great pressure from her demanding military father, Yu-jin, a sensitive girl from the southern part of
South Korea, gains acceptance to a prestigious all-girls college in Seoul. She secretly hopes to “reinvent [her]self, start anew” in the dazzling big city, where she will discover her passion for filmmaking. But after her parents move to the capital and her father is named National Minister of Defense, she remains under close scrutiny. That creates big problems for her after she falls for So-ra, a strong-willed female classmate who wants to be open about their romance. To divert (literal) spying eyes, Yujin dates Min, a likable biracial Korean American who moved to Seoul from Los Angeles as a Samsung consultant in hopes of finding “some sense of belonging.” Then there is the stylish Misaki, a Japanese outsider from a wealthy family whom Yu-jin and So-ra invite to be their roommate—only to coldly ignore her—as another means of hiding the true nature of their relationship. All permutations of this four-way connection unfold dramatically after Yu-jin is found dead of an apparent suicide. In an unusual format, the story is told in alternating chapters by Min (through the third person) as he investigates Yu-jin’s death under threat from government operatives, and by Yu-jin, who narrates the events leading up to her death. Wiley, a first-time novelist, tends to explain his characters’ needs and motivations. But fueled by deep feeling and a powerful sense of place, the book gains real emotional traction in capturing the despair of striving individuals pushed to the margins by conformist norms.
A dark coming-of-age tale in the form of a mystery.
GARDEN VARIETY
Wilhelmi, Christy Morrow/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $16.99 paper | March 29, 2022 978-0-06-311348-0
With love, understanding, and attention, a Los Angeles woman blossoms— much like her beloved community garden. The Vista Mar Community Garden has been a staple of the neighborhood for more than 30 years. Overlooking the ocean and its glorious sunsets, the seven acres are home to individual plots that local residents can pay a nominal fee to cultivate. Board meetings, potlucks, the sharing of recipes, bickering, and the ebb and flow of relationships all take place as the seasons change and crops grow, are harvested, and new crops are planted. Underlying it all is the cantankerous relationship the gardeners have with a longtime homeowner across the street, Kurt Arnold, who detests the way the garden looks, despoiling his ocean view and bringing the wrong kind of people to his neighborhood. Lizzie, a section rep tasked with keeping order, explaining the rules and regulations, and writing citations, has created barriers in her life between herself and others, her work, and her time in the garden. After a failed relationship with a fellow gardener, she thinks her walls are stronger than ever—until she realizes they aren’t. Jared is a new gardener, a jack-of-all-trades who’s just looking for something fun and new to do. Ralph is a shy, awkward programmer who’s been a member for years. Ned, a retired engineer, has been the backbone of the garden for decades, repairing what needs repair and overseeing the space as the garden master. Mary, divorced with grandchildren, is the garden’s current president, and Bernice, a longtime gardener, has aspirations to become president. Author Wilhelmi has created a story that focuses closely on the seasonality of the crops as well as the choices and actions of Lizzie and a core group of gardeners as the very existence of their beloved place is thrown into question.
A gentle story that unfolds through the seasons as love blossoms, crops are grown, and a community garden is protected.
THE ODYSSEY
Williams, Lara Zando (240 pp.) $27.00 | April 26, 2022 978-1-63893-006-8
Aboard a luxury cruise ship, a woman is compelled to confront her past—and embrace her flaws. “What you need to understand is that everything is coming out of and going into nothingness. That is the principle of wabi sabi,” Ingrid, the protagonist of Williams’ peculiar novel, is told by Keith, her boss aboard the vast luxury cruise liner on which she has lived and worked for the past five years, in the book’s opening passage. Williams has predicated the book’s plot on this idea of inevitable decay and deterioration, the acceptance (even the acceleration) of imperfection—yet elements of the story, like the concept behind it, can be challenging to embrace. For somewhat perplexing reasons, Ingrid has left her cozy bourgeois life with a loyal, loving husband, as well her well-appointed home and all her clothes and belongings, to move, with only the most minimal possessions, into a tiny room on a cruise ship and rotate through menial jobs, such as gift shop worker and manicure parlor manager. When she is at sea and not at work, Ingrid primarily spends her time peering moonily out through the small, sealed porthole in her tiny room or meeting up with her two friends, Mia and Ezra—a sister and brother who also rotate through jobs onboard—to eat bland leftovers in the crew mess, watch old sitcoms, or play Families, a game they’ve created in which they take turns being the mother, father, or doted-upon baby. “We all agreed being the baby was best,” Ingrid narrates. On land, she mostly drinks—a lot—and makes bad decisions. When Keith chooses Ingrid to participate in an eccentric mentoring program, she is forced to reckon with her past missteps, personal shortcomings, and painful losses— and things get really strange, leading to Ingrid’s degradation, but also possibly…growth?
Williams’ engaging novel takes the reader on a memorable journey, but its destination remains disappointingly unclear.
city of orange
CITY OF ORANGE
Yoon, David Putnam (352 pp.) $27.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-42216-8
A man wakes up alone near an abandoned housing development with no memory of who he is or how he got there. It’s 2010 in California, and the nameless narrator wakes up in a dried-out riverbed under a concrete bridge. He has a searing headache, the knowledge that he’s living in a post-apocalyptic world, and a bottle of painkillers, but nothing else. He can’t even remember his own name. He slowly figures out how to survive, finding clean water and an abandoned shelter with cans of food. An exploration into the surrounding neighborhood, full of brand-new construction left to rot, results in a terrifying discovery that makes the narrator apprehensive about moving out of his shelter and into an empty house. But one day, a young boy named Clay finds him. Clay is clean and well fed, and though he’s reluctant to answer too many questions, he seems confused when the narrator refers to the world being over. As the narrator slowly tries to piece together the mystery of the apocalypse through Clay’s cryptic clues, he also starts to remember his old life, even the parts he wishes could remain forgotten. Yoon’s version of the apocalypse takes a much narrower focus than many in the genre, focusing on community, family, and loss through the narrator’s personal experience. The start may be a little slow going, but as the narrator begins to pick up the pieces of his memory, his own story becomes much more compelling and heartfelt than the end of the world could ever be.
Out of a ruined America, an earnest and affecting character study.
AVALON
Zink, Nell Knopf (224 pp.) $27.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-593-53489-2
Kafka, King Arthur, and topiary hedges all play a part in this coming-ofage story from the author of Doxology (2019) and Private Novelist (2016). Zink’s stories are filled with oddballs, and her latest novel is no exception. Bran is in fourth grade when her mother enters a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, leaving the girl in the care of her “common-law stepfather,” Doug, in Torrance, California. She’s been working at the plant nursery Doug’s family runs since she was a toddler, so life as an unpaid laborer is the only life she’s ever known, but being the only female in the house becomes increasingly uncomfortable after she hits adolescence—especially when the bikers come to party at the Henderson place. She makes her first friend when she’s in the sixth grade. Jay is rich and gay and an aspiring—and singularly untalented—flamenco dancer. At UCLA, Jay meets Peter, and both Jay and Bran are instantly smitten. Peter’s engagement to another woman does nothing to quell Bran’s desire for him, nor does it stop Peter from repeatedly declaring his love for Bran. A lot of things happen to Bran—she runs away from the Henderson farm after a particularly harrowing encounter with the bikers; at Peter’s insistence, she decides to try her hand at screenwriting; she gets a job as a barista—but her will-they, won’t-they relationship with Peter is the narrative’s central concern. The problem with this is that it’s difficult to understand why Bran and Jay are so obsessed with Peter. Early on, Bran declares, “Throughout this text, I will employ the token ‘[…]’ to indicate inability to quote, paraphrase, or reconstruct things Peter said,” and this is a blessing because Peter is long-winded, pedantic, and occasionally condescending. He vacillates between praising Bran’s beauty and brilliance and reminding her that she’s not quite as smart as him. Bran has a lot in common with Penny, the engaging protagonist of Nicotine (2016), but Zink’s new heroine is subsumed by her tiresome crush.
A rather flat offering from an exceptional author.
mystery
A RIP THROUGH TIME
Armstrong, Kelley Minotaur (352 pp.) $27.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-2508-2000-6
A Vancouver police detective visiting Edinburgh is magically transported back to 1869, where she gets involved in a murder case in which her avatar is deeply implicated. One moment Detective Mallory Atkinson is getting throttled by an identifiable man; the next she’s awakening as Catriona Mitchell, who’s been similarly strangled and left for dead in the same spot. The second attack turns out to be useful for Mallory, who uses Catriona’s trauma as an excuse for forgetting lots of things she ought to know as housemaid to undertaker Duncan Gray, whose medical degree sharpens his interest in the death of Evening Courant crime reporter Archie Evans, a victim of what only Mallory recognizes as waterboarding. What did Archie know that someone wanted to torture out of him? Partnering alternately with Edinburgh Detective Hugh McCreadle; her employer; and Gray’s half sister, shrewd herbalist Isla Ballantyne, Mallory peers into Edinburgh’s seamy underside as she struggles to uncover the truth. It’s a tough job because the most dramatic discoveries she makes are that the woman whose body she’s inhabiting is a bully
and a thief and maybe worse and that Evans’ killer, who goes on to stage another murder that uncannily foretells the work of Jack the Ripper, may well be another visitor from the 21st century. Armstrong handles the time-traveling problems concerning Mallory’s disjointed consciousness and other characters’ awareness that she’s not your typical housemaid with unusual resourcefulness and dexterity. Although the heroine is desperate to return to her own time and place by hook or by crook, the fade-out presents a future that’s pleasingly ambiguous.
The murders are the least mysterious aspect of this clever time-traveling thriller.
HUNGRY DEATH
Blake, Robin Severn House (288 pp.) $29.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-72789-071-9
Coroner Titus Cragg is called upon to investigate a brutal multiple murder. No one is willing to show Cragg the way to the farm of Billy Kidd, but when he finally arrives, he finds a woman with her throat cut along with two little girls and their brothers, all dead. Even the family horse has been shot. In a doghouse Cragg discovers a nonverbal boy and a dog; the body of Kidd hangs in the barn. It looks as if Kidd killed his family and himself, but Cragg has doubts when he learns of the strange religious views Kidd and his neighbors held. On his way to see Kidd’s landlord, magistrate John Blackburne of Orford Hall, Cragg meets Dr. Luke Fidelis, his best friend and frequent partner in investigations, who’s visiting the hall at the request of a Frenchman he once studied with. Soon he and Cragg are investigating the body of a young woman found buried under Blackburne’s hothouse. Her remains are surprisingly well-preserved considering that they’re probably 50 years old. Cragg questions Kidd’s brother, old and new enemies, and people who might be able to identify the body. The answers to all the deaths may lie in a strange religion and past misdeeds that challenge Cragg to be exceptionally clever to ferret out the truth in one of his most difficult cases.
Odd 18th-century mores provide a fitting backdrop for a complex puzzle.
THE LAVA WITCH
Bokur, Debra Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-4967-3785-4
A ritualistic murder draws a resolute detective into the murky world of Hawaiian legends and mysticism.
Maui Police Capt. Walter Alaka’i and his niece, Detective Kali Māhoe, are called to a rugged mountain crime scene in the Kula Forest Reserve, where the body of a tortured young woman has been found hanging from a rainbow tree. A missing person’s report leads Kali to identify the victim as 24-year-old Maya Louise Holmes, an employee with the Center for Marine Mining and Research. With the help of dedicated young Officer David Hara, Kali’s investigation proceeds incrementally and methodically, moving from Maya’s brother, Charles, to her missing car to the interrogation of her co-workers. Haunted by the crime, Kali’s thoughts keep returning to the strange position and condition of the body. Bizarre reports from nearby residents that a band of witches regularly flies through the trees and prowls the beaches echo stories of sorcery that Kali remembers being told as a child by her grandmother, a historian. Was Maya’s murder related to her research or to the occult? Recurring potential love interest Elvar Ellinsson provides more legends of Hawaiian witchcraft, accompanies Kali on her reexamination of the murder scene, and plays bodyguard when Kali is the victim of a break-in. Bokur’s formula is familiar but effectively executed, without flash but with admirable clarity and economy. The straightforward, linear structure and slow roll of her third Dark Paradise mystery (following The Bone Field, 2021) allow the story’s abundant local color to take center stage.
A cool police procedural with engaging characters and fascinating components.
THE DIVA SAYS CHEESECAKE!
Davis, Krista Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-49673-276-7
Another day, another party, another murder for Alexandria, Virginia, advice columnist/event planner Sophie Winston. Cheesecake queen Bobbie Sue Bodoin’s Midsummer Night’s dinner party is the event of Old Town’s season, at least until the Fourth of July extravaganza Sophie’s planning for old Ms. Hollingsworth-Smythe. But Bobbie Sue’s husband, restaurateur Tate Bodoin, is absent and missing the performance their daughter Jo’s ballet class is giving. Fortunately, he’s got a great excuse: He’s lying dead in the alley in back of Blackwell’s Tavern, the place he owns and manages. The obvious suspect is Sophie’s friend Bernie Frei, whose ownership of The Laughing Hound makes him technically Tate’s business competitor. Actually, Blackwell’s assistant manager, Marsha Bathurst, darkly hints, their rivalry was much more personal. Her insinuations, joined with the forensic evidence the Alexandria police dig up, lead Sgt. Wolf Fleishman to arrest Bernie even though Bernie is such a nice guy that nobody, including Fleishman, believes him guilty—except for Marsha, whose relationship to her boss may have run deeper than suspected as well. Actually, Spencer Carver, Bobbie Sue’s first husband, may have had it in for Tate, as may their teenage son, Pierce Carver. And what about Eli Dawson, the Blackwell’s bartender who was two-timing Marsha with Laughing Hound
assistant manager Eva Morales? As Sophie and her best friend, Nina Reid Norwood, swing into action, they’re stunned when one of the suspects actually asks to see their credentials. Credentials? sniffs Nina. Don’t they know about the duo’s impressive record?
Suspicious but forgettable characters fill out a teensy mystery. Eleven appended recipes are the highlight.
DEATH IN A BLACKOUT
Ellicott, Jessica Severn House (256 pp.) $28.99 | May 3, 2022 978-1-44830-652-7
A young woman from the country finds adventure in World War II–era England. At first things look bleak for Wilhelmina “Billie” Harkness of Barton St Giles in rural Wiltshire. Her father, a rector, is a prisoner of war, and her brother’s missing in action. Her mother, after tearing up Billie’s enlistment papers, is run down by a car and killed, leaving Billie alone in the vicarage with her father’s rector, Ronald Kershaw. Afraid of the scandal his living under the same roof as an unmarried woman threatens, he gives Billie an ultimatum: marry him or leave her home. Fortunately, a letter from a cousin she’s never met rescues her. Lydia Harkness, who has pots of money, invites her for an indefinite stay in her gracious home in Hull. A port city, Hull is bigger and busier than sleepy Barton St Giles. It’s also a target of German aircraft, as a raid during Billie’s first night proves. Lydia arranges a job for her cousin in the library, but Billie’s made for more challenging stuff. Before she even starts her new post, she’s recruited as one of Hull’s two female constables, an innovation brought on by the need to send every able-bodied man to the front. After the bang-bang pace of the events that bring Billie out of the vicarage under the watchful eye of her mum to semi-independence in her cousin’s house, readers can expect the very different treat of watching her negotiate for respect in her newly created post. Tackling everything from the theft of Father O’Connell’s bicycle to the death of a young woman the night of the air raid, Billie proves herself more than up to the task.
Brisk and colorful.
MISS MORTON AND THE ENGLISH HOUSE PARTY MURDER
Lloyd, Catherine Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-4967-2328-4
Lloyd leaves behind Kurland St. Mary to introduce a sassy new Regencyperiod heroine with a tough row to hoe. Lady Caroline Morton’s engagement was broken and her reputation destroyed when her father, the Earl of Morton, committed suicide, leaving her and her sister, Susan, penniless. For some years Lady Eleanor, their aunt, has taken in stray children and raised them along with her own offspring, if not always successfully, and some of these are still friends of the family. Lady Eleanor has been housing Susan, and she’s offered Caroline a home as well. But Caroline decides that she’d rather be a paid companion than an unpaid drudge. Now Lady Eleanor insists that Caroline come to the birthday party for her cousin Mabel. To that end, she invites Caroline’s employer, Mrs. Frogerton, a wealthy widow whose fortune comes from trade, and her beautiful, well-dowered daughter, Dorothy. Unfortunately, the other guests include Caroline’s former fiance, Lord Francis Chatham, and his sister, who used to be her best friend. When young Dr. Harris arrives to attend to Lady Eleanor’s butler, who’s had a messy accident in the cellar, it reinforces the doctor’s dislike of the wealthy. Next, Caroline’s great-aunt Ines, who has lived on the estate for many years, is found murdered and Caroline finds a large sum of money hidden in her room. Caroline fears that past secrets have come back to haunt her family members, who insist there were no murders, and at Mrs. Frogerton’s urging, she investigates.
A charming cross between a Regency romance and a wellconstructed detective story with a surprising denouement.
MURDER MOST GRAVE
McKevett, G.A. Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2022 978-1-49672-909-5
Stella Reid juggles eight kids and one murder in McGill, Georgia. Raising her no-account son’s brood isn’t easy for Granny Reid. Even when the older seven are in school, she has 6-month-old Macon Jr. to care for. Still, when only six of her rambunctious grandchildren pile into her tiny cottage after school one day, it isn’t hard to figure out that the missing Reid is Waycross; aside from Macon, he’s the only male. After calling her best friend, Miss Elsie Dingle, to babysit, Stella drives out to the McGill town cemetery, Waycross’ favorite refuge in times of trouble. She finds Waycross at her late husband’s gravesite, sharing his woes with his Grandpa
