A derivative, unchallenging mystery that delights without taxing readers.
When the shady employer of an American woman living in Rome is murdered, she decides to launch an investigation in this debut novel.
Maggie White has been in Rome for months now—she moved from the United States after her husband, Burt, was relocated there for work. She lands a job managing Masterpiece Tours, a company that offers “exclusive painting holidays” to affluent Americans. But not yet a week into the new position, she’s already considering quitting. So consumed by contempt for her insufferable boss, Lord Philip Walpole, she dreams of his demise, a disdain cheekily captured by Moore: “Just a painless, but fatal, heart attack that would strike her boss down in the middle of the night. When that failed to materialize, she imagined him taking a wrong step in front of a speeding bus. Today she moved on to poison.” Maggie’s dream becomes a grim reality when she finds him dead in his study, clearly murdered. The possible suspects are many—Lord Walpole was an unscrupulous man rumored to be an illicit entrepreneur involved in drugs and money laundering, and maybe fraud and blackmail as well. Much to Maggie’s surprise and dismay, the case is quickly closed by Inspector Orsini—he’s “lazy at best and incompetent at worst.” The haste with which he abandons the probe suggests corruption of some kind. Maggie decides to conduct an investigation of her own—she’s impressively sharp and resourceful—an undertaking that ultimately pegs her as a suspect.
Moore’s tale moves along well-established literary grooves, formulaically familiar to anyone who has ever read a murder mystery in which the protagonist becomes an amateur sleuth. In addition, the writing is no more inventive than the plot, brimming with clichés. On the same page readers will find “Be prepared to have your socks knocked off” and “Michelangelo would roll over in his grave.” But originality seems beside the point—the author is clearly not interested in either poetical prose or provocation, but rather easily consumed, breezily companionable entertainment. And this is precisely what Moore delivers, and with a kind of artistically unobtrusive skill. The plot is suspenseful without ever becoming too anxiety inducing, and the skullduggery surrounding Lord Walpole’s life is dark without ever turning disturbingly macabre. At the heart of it all is the charmingly innocuous protagonist, who seems bored by the banality of her own quotidian existence. Now that’s she enlivened by a greater purpose, she’s not eager to return to her former life: “Mrs. Burt White, bridge player, lifelong student, and lady who lunches.” Her character flirts with complexity—an achingly ordinary person who pines for excitement and, if given the opportunity, is so clearly capable of achieving more in life. The details of the murder are complicated enough but not torturously so—it is at least possible that readers will also crack the case, and the prospect of doing so may very well be the book’s most alluring element. For those in search of an enjoyably dramatic tale served without asking the audience for much in return—essentially fiction just a notch above passive fare—this fits the bill.
A derivative, unchallenging mystery that delights without taxing readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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