Less notable for its individual stories than for the revised narrative they support that shows Victorian women actively...
Veteran anthologist Klinger’s fondness for shadows (In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, 2015, etc.) leads him to a bit of overreaching: none of the 17 authors showcased here toiled in Christie’s shadow, because their stories all appeared between 1850 and 1917, before Christie had published a word.
Even so, Klinger the archivist and editor has done the field an invaluable service by excavating so many stories, mostly, as his subtitle aptly puts it, “by forgotten female authors” from the supposed interregnum between Poe and Conan Doyle. True, the earliest and most obscure of his discoveries—Catherine Crowe’s “The Advocate’s Wedding Day,” Mary Fortune’s “Traces of Crime,” Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Mr. Furbush”—are so ponderous and unmysterious that they’re more likely to interest antiquarians than fans, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Squire’s Story,” though more finely wrought, offers little more mystery than its contemporaries. The plot thickens with Ellen Wood’s “Mrs. Todhetley’s Earrings,” which adds an actual, albeit transparent, mystery; Elizabeth Corbett’s “Catching a Burglar,” which sends detective Dora Bell undercover as a lady’s maid; and C.L. Pirkis’ “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” in which sleuthing Loveday Brooke brings some ingenuity to the case of a stolen check. Ellen Glasgow raises questions about the morality of abetting a criminal’s suicide in “Point in Morals”; L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace provide a virtually unguessable cause of violent death in “The Blood-Red Cross”; a nondescript Viennese detective clears a man accused of murder in Augusta Groner’s stolid “The Case of the Registered Letter”; the ghost in M.E. Braddon’s “The Winning Sequence” hides a shameful secret; the disappearance of a valuable formula in Anna Katherine Green’s “Missing: Page Thirteen,” holds the key to a long-unsuspected crime. The best stories, though, are by the least-forgotten names in the genre. The detective known as The Old Man in the Corner shines in Baroness Orczy’s “The Regent’s Park Murder”; Carolyn Wells sends up the genre amusingly in “The Adventure of the Clothes-Line”; and Susan Glaspell’s frequently reprinted “Jury of Her Peers” brings the volume to an appropriately grim yet triumphant close.
Less notable for its individual stories than for the revised narrative they support that shows Victorian women actively working the field long before Miss Marple.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-630-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Kelly’s cats are magical, but not magical enough to distinguish them from a clowder of kitty cozies.
Determined to clear a friend in a businessman’s murder, a Minnesota librarian gets invaluable help from her two magical cats, who are there for her as long as the sardines don’t run out.
Kathleen Paulson is psyched when her brother, Ethan, and his band, the Flaming Gerbils, come to stay with her in Mayville Heights, her adopted hometown. Ethan’s excited not only to spend some quality time with his sister, but also to get to know her closest friend, Maggie, who seems as if she could be more than a friend to him. Good vibes abound until Ethan’s newest band mate, temporary lead guitarist Derek Hanson, gets into a tussle with a man at a bar the whole crew is visiting. Though Kathleen doesn’t condone violence, the man in question, businessman Lewis Wallace, seems to have had it coming to him after kicking a veteran’s service dog. Kathleen doesn’t know much about Wallace, and what she hears isn’t good, but rumors that follow the skirmish suggest he’s come to town to turn over a new leaf. After the incident with Derek, Kathleen, a born animal lover, doesn’t find Wallace sympathetic until she stumbles on his dead body. Kathleen’s boyfriend, town detective Marcus Gordon, is fairly certain that Wallace has been murdered, but it’s hard to know who had a motive besides Derek. In an effort to clear the guitarist, Kathleen tries to figure out who else had reason to do Wallace harm. Variously supported by her two magical cats, Owen and Hercules (The Cats Came Back, 2018, etc.), Kathleen uses her research skills and social networks to suss out the truth.
Kelly’s cats are magical, but not magical enough to distinguish them from a clowder of kitty cozies.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-440-00113-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Plotted and peopled with unstinting generosity, even if the regulars are never quite as amusing as the author thinks.
Superintendent Richard Jury’s 25th case is less a star turn than a team effort for a trio of detectives and their deep bench of helpers and hangers-on.
A pair of young sisters out walking the beach of Bryher, the smallest inhabited Isle of Scilly off the Cornish coast, find the body of a woman who’s been shot to death. Since Bryher is accessible only by ferry, it stands to reason that whoever killed Manon Vinet is still on the island. That’s hard for the close-knit native community to accept. What makes the case even harder for Divisional Commander Brian Macalvie, called in from Exeter to head the investigation, is that the victim’s most prominent link to the outside world—the fact that she once nursed the late Gerald Summerston—links her to still more violence when Summerston’s niece, Flora Flood, is arrested for fatally shooting her estranged husband, Tony Servino. Flora denies the charges, but her account—Tony threatened her because he was enraged at being served with divorce papers after a two-year separation; she only shot at his feet; an intruder entering at just that moment fired the fatal bullet from a gun of the same caliber—seems calculated to inspire skepticism from even her next-door neighbor Jury’s old friend Melrose Plant. While Jury and Sir Thomas Brownell, a legendary detective retired from Scotland Yard, are still trying to figure out whether the two murders are connected, their attention is claimed by a third: the shooting of former Summerston maid Moira Quinn in Exeter Cathedral, right on Macalvie’s home turf. The ensuing rounds of inquiry and cross-checking would tax most novelists and their detectives to the limit, but Grimes (The Knowledge, 2018, etc.) keeps dropping unexpected complications, newly minted characters, and familiar faces into a mix that becomes so head-spinning that most readers are likely to greet the denouement with a combination of surprise and relief.
Plotted and peopled with unstinting generosity, even if the regulars are never quite as amusing as the author thinks.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4740-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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