Blink and you’ll miss the killer, who has to fight for attention with all the rest of the period mayhem.
More skulduggery high and low knocks at the door of a pair of Victorian enquiry agents.
Prostitution has never guaranteed a long life, but a rash of poisonings has taken London working girls at distressingly young ages. A year and a half ago, 17-year-old Mabel Glossop was discovered in Cremorne Gardens with a copy of Moby-Dick. Now she’s joined by Clara Jenkins, only four years older, posed with a copy of The Fruits of Philosophy. But it’s the third victim who’s the most shocking: Lt. Anstruther Peebles, found dead in woman’s apparel even though no one in his regiment would have suspected him of turning tricks. All three victims, it turns out, were artists’ models, and so is Evangeline French, discovered with a copy of John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River. The Ruskin novel is of special interest to American-born painter James McNeill Whistler, who’s already hired his compatriot Matthew Grand and his English counterpart James Batchelor to conduct a thorough investigation of his enemy Ruskin. The stakes rise, and the case broadens, when Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold is one of several paintings vandalized as they hang in the Grosvenor Gallery, which, as Ruskin’s ex-wife, Effie Gray, assures Grand’s inamorata, Lady Caroline Wentworth, everyone knows is haunted. Series fans will know better than to expect all these threads to be tightly wound up. But Trow piles on the society gossip, celebrity cameos, and blood and thunder with the panache of a pastry chef concocting a mega-calorie dessert.
Blink and you’ll miss the killer, who has to fight for attention with all the rest of the period mayhem.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78029-130-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.
Murder and a host of lesser but more time-consuming complications dog the production of costumer Joey Jessop’s latest film project.
An unknown woman running from a restaurant is struck and killed by a silver Lexus SUV. It’s a painful moment for everyone involved, but especially for Joey, who’d seen the woman dragged and chased out of the restaurant kitchen minutes earlier by a cook and another menacing man and hadn’t said anything about it. Tyrone Thomas, the head of the studio producing The Golden Age, which is filming nearby, is less interested in encouraging his crew to cooperate with the police than in making sure no whiff of bad publicity touches his stars. And so much intrigue swirls around leading lady Gillian Best—from her quarrel with personal assistant Rita Ranucci to her hush-hush exchange with personal manager Dan Lomax to her unpublicized relationship with personal videographer Armand Dubois—that keeping it all under wraps is likely to be a full-time job. But not for Joey, whose full-time job, once costume designer Gregory Bentham is called back to England by his husband’s illness and the production’s deal with boutique Italian costume manufacturer Bergati falls through, is arranging for the last-minute design and construction of hundreds of World War I–era costumes for a movie whose story McCown, intent on the worm’s-eye view, never bothers to share. Another violent death will provide a sop to genre fans, but this is really a relentlessly detailed account of the thousands of obstacles to producing a movie.
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781639106646
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Appealing characters combine seamlessly with a twisty mystery in this pleasing tale of love and hate.
The Christmas season brings joy and murder into the lives of a close-knit family.
Hana Keller works at her family’s Hungarian Tea House and helps her boyfriend, police detective Erik Wolf, solve the occasional murder. One snowy night she spots an agitated young man wearing a Riverwood University hoodie coming out of an alley, a sighting that will immerse her in a tricky case of murder. A birthday gift of dual lizard teacups she receives from her uncle is another connection to the death of college professor Sandor Balog, for Hana knew him as a fellow collector, albeit one with deeper pockets and more expensive tastes. The young man she saw was dumping the gun he’d found on the floor of Balog’s office, afraid it would implicate his mother, a fellow foreign language teacher at Riverwood. Hana’s grandmother is psychic, and Hana’s inherited some of her abilities, though she’s not confident in them. Balog enjoyed a complicated love life and had made a number of enemies in the language department, so there’s no dearth of suspects. While Erik works all the usual police angles, Hana uses her roots in the Hungarian community to talk to people about Balog. Even Christmas shopping and holiday parties at the tea house provide some clues. But it’s Hana’s special abilities that lead her to a startling conclusion.
Appealing characters combine seamlessly with a twisty mystery in this pleasing tale of love and hate.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984804-86-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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