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 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
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
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