Competing romances, slippery spies, and the horrors of the Blitz combine in an exciting mystery/adventure.
It's 1940 in London, and a family of locksmiths with a sideline in theft pulls off another job for the Crown.
When Electra McDonnell and her family got caught trying to steal jewels, their choice was prison or working for the handsome, enigmatic Major Ramsey. Ellie’s attracted to the dashing aristocrat, but so far their relationship has remained professional and sometimes antagonistic. Ramsey wants Ellie’s Uncle Mick but has to settle for Ellie when he needs to remove a locked bracelet from the arm of a woman found dead in the Thames. Unlocking the bracelet is easy, and Ellie’s able to provide some insight into Myra Fields’ station in life from her clothing. A search reveals a camera in the bracelet, a clock key, and a bag of jewels hidden in the lining of a sable coat. Ellie’s first job with Ramsey—in A Peculiar Combination (2021)—gave her a taste for danger, and she’s more than willing to help uncover an espionage ring that’s taking photos of juicy targets for the Germans. To Ramsey’s dismay, Ellie calls on family friend and romantic interest Felix Lacey for help with a crooked pawnshop owner. Family contacts help track down the source of the jewels and lead to a boardinghouse where Myra lived. Ellie, with Ramsey masquerading as her husband, pretends to be Myra’s cousin in order to look for clues. Once the German bombing commences, they push even harder to roll up the dangerous spy ring even as Ellie continues to look into her mother’s conviction for murdering her father, a crime she denied to the day she died.
Competing romances, slippery spies, and the horrors of the Blitz combine in an exciting mystery/adventure.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2507-8050-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.
A vainglorious viscount is murdered in this 1910-set mystery—Montgomery’s first novel for adults and the launch of the Stockingham & Pike series.
As the novel opens, narrator Stephen Pike, not yet 20 years old and fresh from a two-year stint at a London prison, finds himself in Cornwall at World’s End, taking a job as a second footman at a remote manor house. (So far, so Downton Abbey.) He arrives at a time of high anxiety: Lord Stockingham-Welt has seen to it that the windows of Tithe Hall have been boarded up in anticipation of Comet Halley’s appearance—“This time, it will be the end of the world,” he insists. The comet spares the earth, but the night doesn’t spare the viscount: The next morning, he’s found dead in his study, which was locked from the inside, with an ancestral crossbow’s bolt in his eye. Who better than un-alibied recent inmate Stephen to take the blame for the murder? To Stephen’s aid comes Miss Decima Stockingham, the viscount’s elderly great-aunt, who makes Downton Abbey’s Violet Crawley seem like an earth mother. A frustrated scientist, Miss Decima hated her late nephew—“Conrad stole my inheritance, my sister, my career…everything”—but she hates Stephen’s victimization more. The book’s ingenious reveal, which hinges on a long-buried Stockingham family secret, is reached through a combination of Miss Decima’s scientific-inquiry-fueled deductions and Stephen’s precocious puzzling (the story features both a hedge maze and a spot-the-difference-style brainteaser). The odd-couple intergenerational sleuthing duo is a welcome new arrival on the historical-mystery scene, with Stephen’s squeamishness about Miss Decima’s filterless fuming a mainstay of the book’s unremitting humor (Stephen: “I’d never heard language like it…and I’d just spent the last month sharing a bunk with a man called Filthy Mick”).
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063458772
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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