A smart and fast-paced hippie noir.
Petersen’s novel offers a winning Summer of Love take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Mr. Longfellow (whom everyone simply calls Longfellow) is a British expatriate living in San Francisco and working as an attorney. The year is 1967, it’s the first weeks of the Summer of Love, and he’s having foreboding dreams about dead hippie girls. That’s not the only strange thing happening: When Longfellow visits his fellow British expatriate and psychiatric researcher friend Jonathan St. Amour, the Good Doctor, as Jonathan is known, leads him through his impressive new laboratory with its “long row of glass cages filled with snakes of every conceivable size and variation, all slithering about and hissing and showing off their tongues.” Jonathan lectures Longfellow and other gathered guests about his recent study of transmogrification, the ability to “unleash the will to be whatever we wanted to be.” Even more curious than this is the Good Doctor’s request to Longfellow regarding the alteration of Jonathan’s will—he wishes to bequeath his life earnings to a man unknown to Longfellow in the event of an unexplained absence for any period exceeding three months. This unknown man, Dr. Asmodeus Youngblood, soon moves in with the Good Doctor and begins running the home. Longfellow takes it upon himself to start following Youngblood, a hippie who wears “a tall top hat tilted rakishly low on his forehead. The word ‘LOVE’ had been painted in bold white brush strokes across the black felt. He was dressed in a long, full-length indigo plush velvet coat, with the collar flipped up, covering his face and ears.” Longfellow becomes convinced that Dr. Youngblood is planning to do away with Jonathan and enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend, a detective named Maggie Shaughnessy, to figure out what’s going on. His suspicions intensify when a young girl is found dead and he becomes convinced that Dr. Youngblood is her killer. Intercut with scenes of the investigation are Longfellow’s visions and dreams, presented as italicized poems as he tries to connect the swirling dots of the case.
The story will read as familiar to anyone acquainted with Robert Louis Stevenson’s original Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)—Petersen acknowledges the obvious precedent in the afterword. Like the original, this story is fleet-footed, moving quickly from scene to scene in short chapters in which the author displays an impressive command of atmosphere. Petersen captures the textures of the era and the unease that the relatively straightlaced Longfellow feels as he is forced to navigate the Fillmore and various hippie gatherings: “I saw a sea of hippies blowing whistles, counting their toes, diddling with kinetic sculptures that ‘thundered’ when struck, sharing with each other their feathers, whistles and curious pebbles.” In creating Longfellow and giving him an obedient Schnauzer who comes along on his investigations, the author has also potentially decanted a formula for a new detective series, should he decide to pursue it. Even if the solution to the central mystery may appear obvious to readers early in the story, the evocative first-person narration by Longfellow will still keep them reading.
A smart and fast-paced hippie noir.Pub Date: March 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781967227013
Page Count: 217
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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