BROOKLYN ON FIRE

A turn-of-the-20th-century Brooklyn detective must find a killer to save her brother.

The year is 1890. Mary Handley, who maintains a little office in Mr. Lazlo’s bookshop, hopes the notoriety she gained from solving the Goodrich murder case (Second Street Station, 2015) will jump-start her career as a consulting detective. She’s delighted when Emily Worsham asks her to prove that her uncle, John Worsham, was murdered. Little does Mary know that the case will propel her into a perilous hunt among the bluebloods of Manhattan and the crooked politicians who run her own city, which is still independent, not yet a borough of New York. Worsham’s first wife, Arabella, is now married to wealthy, ruthless Collis Huntington, who will do anything to please her but is having a difficult time moving into high society and is less than pleased with the possible scandal trailing her first marriage. In the meantime, Mary’s police officer brother, Sean, who’s been promoted to homicide, has a tricky case of his own to solve. When Mary follows Arabella to a museum, she meets George Vanderbilt, who takes a shine to her and acts as her assistant in the Worsham case, his entree into New York society proving invaluable. The clues they find take them to Richmond, where Worsham met and married Arabella. When Sean is arrested for killing his fiancee, Mary struggles to find the real killer. She’s nearly killed when she gets too close to the dangerous secrets at the heart of these intertwined cases.

Again Levy does a fine job of mixing historical characters and situations with his feisty, liberated detective.