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
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.
Savage dope dealers, dirty cops, corrupt officials, and a few hapless civilians mix it up in New York City.
After The Cartel (2015), Winslow follows the drug trade onto the streets. The Manhattan North Special Task Force is a lightly supervised assemblage of “the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest” cops in the NYPD, and Denny Malone commands a happily representative task force squad: his boyhood pal Phil Russo; big, black Bill Montague, who dresses like an Ivy League professor; and Billy O’Neill, the youngest. The book opens with Malone in a federal lockup—how he got there unfolds in breakneck flashbacks told in the cadences and vocabulary of a cop’s speech. The pivotal, but by no means the first, of his many indiscretions is skimming $4 million and 20 kilos of heroin from the scene of a major bust. He also executes the kingpin, and in the raid, Billy is killed. The narrative picks up five months later, and the legal and extralegal exploits of the task force are detailed. The reader is asked to admire the effectiveness of their policing while condemning their methods—Joseph Wambaugh did it better. Malone’s brother, Liam, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, and that horrific disaster for first responders forms a grim attitudinal backdrop to their days. Malone and the boys are dirty cops: they take and deliver payoffs, ignore the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, and administer crude vigilante justice. Drugs are gotten off the street, though some may go up their noses or into their lungs. Eventually Malone is trapped, caught on tape offering to broker a payoff to an assistant district attorney. He cuts a deal to name lawyers but not cops, but corrupt prosecutors and deceitful administrators confound him. His alternatives shrink; more deals are made and abrogated. Are Malone’s crimes an inescapable consequence of his working conditions? Must the police break the law to keep the peace?
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266441-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Nearly as many recipes as Joy of Cooking, and about as much narrative.
A baker helps solve her sister’s boyfriend’s classmate’s murder.
Hannah Swensen is suffering from stress due to a trauma incurred in her last adventure (Chocolate Cream Pie Murder, 2019) but alluded to only in the most elliptical terms in her current entry. Hannah’s stepfather, Doc Knight, is adamant: She must leave at once for vacation. He sends Hannah and her mom off to California for a stress-free holiday helping Hannah’s college friend Lynne Larchmont pack up her palatial home and move back to Lake Eden, Minnesota, where Hannah’s shop, The Cookie Jar, provides sweet treats for all. A New York minute after she arrives in Los Angeles, Hannah receives a hysterical call from her sister, Michelle. Michelle’s boyfriend, Lonnie, is the main suspect in the murder of Darcy Hicks, an old friend from high school. Since Lonnie is one of Lake Eden’s handful of police detectives, everyone else on the force is deemed ineligible to conduct the investigation, leaving only amateur sleuth Hannah to crack the case. Hannah moves back in, platonically of course, with her old flame Norman Rhodes, since her Lake Eden condo was the scene of that unspecified trauma and her husband, Ross Barton, has disappeared, or died, or maybe killed somebody—it’s not quite clear which. Hannah begins her investigation by checking out Brian and Cassie Polinski, who were with Darcy and Lonnie at the Double Eagle, a dive bar, the night of her death. But it’s hard for her inquiry to build up any steam because almost every chapter ends with copious directions for making another nifty treat, complete with tips on which brands to use, advice about where to buy the ingredients, and little anecdotes about the people who feast on the finished products.
Nearly as many recipes as Joy of Cooking, and about as much narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1889-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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