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
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 lavish food descriptions and appended recipes are the best parts of this anemic mystery.
Christmas is coming, but so is trouble for South Lick, Indiana.
Robbie Jordan, owner and chief cook at Pans ’N Pancakes, returns from solving a murder in California just in time for the holiday rush, which is complicated more than most Christmastimes by a number of surprises that disrupt her circle of friends. First, her assistant, Danna Beedle, gets a visit from Marcus Vandemere, a young biracial man claiming to be her half brother, an assertion that thrills Danna despite the doubts of some friends and relatives. Next comes a fire that nearly destroys the home of anesthesiologist Dr. William Geller, a racist whose wife, Tina, reportedly left him years ago. When a skeleton turns up in the attic, the not-so-esteemed doctor has some explaining to do. Robbie’s nemesis, Detective Octavia Slade, who recently married Robbie’s former boyfriend, is more willing than usual to accept help from Robbie, who has a knack for finding things out. The next to die is Tina’s twin, Toni, who knew Marcus from karate classes. Toni’s husband is the prime suspect, but Robbie’s convinced the fatalities are connected. With help from her boyfriend and her network of friends, she attempts to clear things up before the killer spoils her holiday by adding her to his list.
The lavish food descriptions and appended recipes are the best parts of this anemic mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2317-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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