Despite its predecessors, Waugh’s indispensable novel remains the true progenitor of the modern procedural.
Waugh’s pioneering 1952 police procedural has gathered nary a speck of dust over the last 69 years.
First-year student Marilyn Lowell Mitchell, 18, stays after class to confer with her history teacher, skips lunch with her roommate because she’s not feeling well, and then vanishes from the campus of Massachusetts’s fictitious Parker College. Her housemother assumes she’s gone off with a boy; when the police fail to find any trace of her, suspicions deepen that she’s sneaked off to have an abortion. The reward her father offers—“$5,000 IF FOUND ALIVE. $2,500 IF FOUND DEAD”—fails to turn up any new leads, and the Philadelphia private detective he hires adds nothing substantial. So it’s up to the local law to find Lowell. Bristol Police Chief Frank W. Ford and DS Burton K. Cameron track down every man she’s dated and drain a local lake without success. When Lowell’s body is eventually discovered, DA Dave McNarry uses veiled references from her diary entries to make a case for suicide, but Ford tries a daring experiment that convinces the judge it’s murder. What’s most remarkable about Waugh’s expert handling of a formula that’s since become commonplace is its severe economy. As Leslie S. Klinger’s Introduction points out, Waugh’s not interested in racial, class, or economic conflicts; everyone in Bristol seems cut from the same cloth. It goes further: The suspects are never more than suspects; the detectives have no private lives to speak of; and when Ford quarrels with Cameron or McNarry, it’s always about the case, which proceeds methodically to a solution as satisfying as it is unsurprising.
Despite its predecessors, Waugh’s indispensable novel remains the true progenitor of the modern procedural.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4642-1305-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
The always delightful heroine and her sleuthing family do not disappoint in this mélange of mysteries.
The fearless and soignée Phryne Fisher investigates several mysteries as intriguing as they are perilous in post–World War I Australia.
In addition to excellent taste in clothes and men, the Honourable Miss Fisher has something else: a disdain for rules that’s served her well as a private investigator. She can tell that something’s bothering Dot Williams, her lady's maid and companion, who reveals that an anonymous letter reading only REPENT! was left in Phryne’s mailbox, kicking off the first of her investigations. Her two adopted daughters, Jane and Ruth, are helping out at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind for a school project, and one of the teachers asks Jane to use her math skills to check over the institute's books, where it seems "there's something amiss." Meanwhile, Phryne drops in on Jeoffrey Bisset, a lecturer in classics and English, who invites her to dinner at his home in Williamstown the next evening. When the time comes, they enjoy each other more than the food, but Phryne finds herself involved in opium smuggling when an after-dinner stroll reveals a man stabbed to death on the beach. Phryne’s sometime lover Lin Chung, a respected leader in the Chinese community, is called to identify the body and resolves to look for whoever’s smuggling opium, a scourge in the community. Phryne sets her adopted son, Tinker, to investigate the anonymous letter while Jane and Ruth try to sniff out an embezzler at the Institute for the Blind. Reserving for herself the dangerous job of tracking down the murderous smugglers with a little help from her friends, Phryne uncovers some surprising answers.
The always delightful heroine and her sleuthing family do not disappoint in this mélange of mysteries.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781728279244
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Sometimes smart writing can be too clever to be something more.
A threatening note sends a mystery writer into investigative mode to protect those closest to her from danger.
Clever thinking and a knack for storytelling make author Eleanor Dash the perfect fit for her job. Well, that and her ability to write from her own life experience, which is quite a robust source of information. Sometimes too robust, as she finds while on the set of the movie adaptation of her novel When in Rome. Eleanor is thrilled that her longtime best friend, Emma Wood, will be playing the film’s lead opposite big-time movie star Fred Winter. The Catalina Island setting is remote and romantic, the perfect place for Emma and Fred to fall in love for real. In the wake of a preproduction fling turned serious, the two are surprising their colleagues and friends with a post-wrap wedding. The filming of Eleanor’s first novel awakens all sorts of personal memories of roguish playboy Connor Smith, the simultaneous hero and villain of her Vacation Mysteries series and her real life. Though her boyfriend, Oliver Forrest, is otherwise secure, seeing Connor show up in the flesh as the filming ends is a bit of a trigger. A bigger trigger is a vague anonymous note announcing that “someone is going to die at the wedding.” Eleanor switches into problem-solving mode, but she can’t do much to prevent the murders from piling up. Can she find the killer, or will her nearest and dearest be at risk?
Sometimes smart writing can be too clever to be something more.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781250326133
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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