A subdued period piece that never lives up to its promising title.
Murder complicates the lives of future cookbook writer Julia Child’s friends in 1949 Paris.
Julia has a mayonnaise problem. Although her cuisine runs rings around that of her half-French friend Tabitha Knight, who’s left her work at an American bomber plant to give French lessons to relocated fellow citizens, her mayonnaise remains stubbornly on-again, off-again. She and Tabitha are distracted from this existential dilemma by the discovery of a corpse stabbed to death in their building’s cellar. To her considerable discomfort, Tabitha recognizes the body as that of Thérèse Lognon, an attendee at a party given the night before by Julia’s younger sister, Dorothy, for her colleagues in the American Club Theater, whose current production of And Then There Were None at the Théâtre Monceau featured Thérèse checking garments in the cloakroom. The leading suspects all have more prominent roles in the production: Thad Whiting as sound and lighting designer, Johnny Cantrell as stage manager and set designer, and Neil Kingsley as ill-fated character Philip Lombard. Tabitha’s informal but highly irregular investigations, which motivate a near-fatal collision between her bicycle and a car that speeds away, bring her up so often against Inspecteur Étienne Merveille that it’s a wonder she’s still walking around free when the killer claims a second victim. Though she’s no great shakes as a detective, Tabitha is miles ahead of Merveille in tying the two deaths to a timely but unconvincing Russian spy ring. Throughout it all, Child remains as serenely marginal and undeveloped a character as Agatha Christie was in Cambridge’s A Trace of Poison (2022), though she does eventually solve that mayonnaise problem.
A subdued period piece that never lives up to its promising title.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781496739599
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
The pre–World War II ambiance provides an apt setting for some ingenious murders in a case worthy of the clever sleuth.
An aristocratic young mother proves a dab hand at solving murders in 1937.
Lady Georgiana O’Mara is a cousin to both the new King George VI and the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated to marry the rapacious Mrs. Simpson. She’s married to the Honorable Darcy O’Mara, heir to an Irish title, but they don’t have much money even though Darcy works for the government in a hush-hush position. Luckily, she’s the heir to her well-off godfather, who’s letting Georgie, Darcy, and their son, James, live in his home. Everything is going well until Georgie’s bossy sister-in-law, Fig, Duchess of Rannoch, sends a much-too-proper nanny to take care of James, and announces that she intends to visit herself to make sure things run as she insists they should. Thoroughly intimidated, Georgie unhappily puts up with her unwanted visitors. Darcy encourages Georgie to go to London to visit her friend Zou Zou, a Polish princess who might help her find a nanny more to her liking. When Georgie arrives at her friend’s house, Zou Zou is rushing off to a funeral for a young man who died in a tragic accident, but Georgie soon runs into another friend, Belinda, who’s just returned from Paris. Another young man has just died in an apparent accident, but there’s something that doesn’t sit well with Georgie about the deaths. The death of a third young man sets the alarm bells ringing, and a fourth death sends sirens blaring, urging Georgie to look for connections among the deceased. They were all Darcy’s age and all set to inherit estates. Why were they targeted for death?
The pre–World War II ambiance provides an apt setting for some ingenious murders in a case worthy of the clever sleuth.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641392
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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