Apart from one gratingly predictable plot twist, Ifkovic (Final Curtain, 2014, etc.) successfully blends homicide with a...
Edna Ferber’s sixth case takes her back in time to a cosmopolitan city and a late-night murder.
Two years after the Titanic disaster, reporter/author Ferber travels to her father’s homeland of Hungary. In Budapest, she and her suffragist friend Winifred Moss take rooms in the shabby Árpád Hotel, where the electricity is capricious and a portrait of the Emperor Franz Josef covers the dumbwaiter in every room. The heart of the hotel is the Café Europa, a center for gossip, intrigue, and front-page news, at least according to Harold Gibbon, a journalist for the Hearst syndicate. The ferretlike reporter wants to write a book about the decline and fall of the Austrian Empire and sees no better symbol for it than the upcoming marriage of the beautiful but gauche American heiress Cassandra Blaine to an impoverished, second-rate Austrian count. Winifred thinks empty-headed Cassandra laughs too loudly and defeats the cause of women’s rights. But Edna sees that the laughter covers up heartbreak: Cassandra’s in love with Endre Molnár, who’s from an old Hungarian family that isn’t noble enough to tempt Cassandra’s social-climbing mother. And the Blaine fortune, which comes from American-manufactured firearms, is all that interests her cold, unattractive fiance. Then Cassandra confides in Edna that she heard something she didn’t understand, and she’s afraid. Before Edna can decide how to help, Cassandra gets a note from Molnár to meet him in the garden, where she’s stabbed to death. Her Hungarian lover is the top suspect, but Edna and Gibbon think that the murderer could as easily be a fading singer who helped arrange the marriage, a failed poet, or a sinister American businessman who seems to be everywhere watching everyone. Gibbon thinks he has the answer, but it falls to Edna, with the help of two Hungarian artists, to find the missing piece to the puzzle.
Apart from one gratingly predictable plot twist, Ifkovic (Final Curtain, 2014, etc.) successfully blends homicide with a loving homage to Budapest on the eve of World War I.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0048-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
A run-of-the-mill mystery that includes some welcome tips on the health benefits of chocolate.
An accountant and her lawyer husband must revisit his high school days in order to solve a murder.
Lee Woodyard is no fan of the scheme her husband, Joe, and her uncle, Hogan Jones, the local police chief, hatch to buy the Bailey house next door and flip it. But even though she’d rather be at her job as business manager at her aunt’s chocolate specialty shop (The Chocolate Bunny Brouhaha, 2016, etc.), she agrees to meet with the plumber for an estimate—a meeting that turns dangerous when plumber Digger Brown finds a bundle of rags in the cellar. When he drops them, a gun hidden in the bundle goes off, sending a bullet whizzing past Lee. No one seems to know where the old fashioned six-shooter came from, but the accident recalls a past incident in which the Sharks, a group of high school boys that included Brad Davis, Chip Brown, Sharpy Brock, Tad Bailey, and Spud Dirk, pulled a prank that could have been deadly. Years ago, when several Sharks pretended as a joke to rob a convenience store in which Brad was working, Brad pulled a real gun and fired but hit nothing more vital than the Frozen Rainbow Machine. Now Brad’s the president of the VanHorn–Davis Foundation, whose charitable donations underwrite many improvements to the Michigan lakeside town of Warner Pier. When Lee accompanies Hogan to the Bailey house to show him where the gun was, they find more than they bargained for—Spud’s corpse in a cupboard. Although Hogan’s the police chief, he must stay out of the investigation because Spud had been competing with him to buy the Bailey house. So Lee, who’d prefer to stick to chocolates, is forced to join Joe in detective work.
A run-of-the-mill mystery that includes some welcome tips on the health benefits of chocolate.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-10000-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.
Crime-fighting Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett outdoes himself during a temporary transfer from sleepy Saddlestring to fashionable Jackson Hole.
Will Jensen, the Jackson game warden, was a great guy and a model warden, but once his wife left him six months ago, he spiraled into madness and suicide, and now Joe’s been called to replace him. The transition is anything but smooth. There’s no question of Joe’s family coming with him, so he’s reduced to hoping he can get a signal for the cell-phone calls he squeezes into his busy schedule. En route to his new posting, Joe has to pursue a marauding grizzly. He arrives to meet a formidable series of challenges. Cantankerous outfitter Smoke Van Horn wants to go on attracting elk with illegal salt licks without the new warden’s interference. Animal Liberation Network activist Pi Stevenson wants him to publicize her cause and adopt a vegan diet. Developer Don Ennis wants to open a housing development for millionaires who like their meat free of additives. Ennis’s trophy wife Stella simply wants Joe—and he wants her back. As he wrestles with these demands, and with a supervisor riled over Joe’s track record of destroying government property in pursuit of bad guys (Trophy Hunt, 2004, etc.), Joe slowly becomes convinced that Will did not kill himself.
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15291-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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