MURDER IN MONTPARNASSE

Paris, 1925. Three years after Hemingway look-alike Jason Waddington lost two years’ worth of work when his wife Hadley—er, Priscilla—packed his manuscripts into a valise and left it on the platform of the Gare de Lyon, trouble is brewing again among the expatriate artists. A serial killer of artists’ models dubbed “Paris Jack,” after Jack the Ripper, has already claimed six victims when he strikes at French teacher Laure Duclos, a hanger-on of Wad’s and sometime lover of several of his friends, including, most recently, infatuated Canadian journalist Michael Ward. But was it really Paris Jack who killed Laure, or was the murderer a copycat, perhaps a member of Wad’s own circle? Setting aside the walk-ons who appear under their proper names—Joyce and Pound, Toklas and Stein, Sylvia Beach and Robert McAlmon—the suspect list seems to include both real-life friends of Hemingway (Jazz Age king Wilson O’Donnell and his madcap flapper wife Georgia) and characters from “the Spanish novel” his distressed friends are pressing him not to publish (Princeton boxer Hal Leopold, hard-bitten divorcÇe Lady Biz Leighton). The mystery keeps loping back to those missing manuscripts, but the real interest is in watching Engel avoid blemishing the memory of any well-remembered writers or characters when he fingers the killer. When you can’t swing a dead body without hitting somebody famous, the air’s bound to be thick with the lively, empty chatter of vivacious pretenders. The main break with Engel’s Benny Cooperman series (Getting Away with Murder, 1998, etc.) is that this really is set in the period that series evokes.