Bonus: Readers can congratulate themselves on having the enlightened social attitudes the victim and suspects sorely lack.
As World War II looms, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham headline a fundraiser in an aristocratic manse that promptly turns into a murder scene.
The morning after the four bestselling authors—who, along with Baroness Emma Orczy, coincidentally starred in Marie Benedict’s The Queens of Crime just last month—join ranks to raise money for real-life activist Lady Stella Reading’s Women’s Voluntary Service, their host, ex-MP Sir Henry Heathcote of Hursley House, smokes his last cigar, which someone’s dipped in cyanide. Since the baronet’s idea of supporting his native land’s values includes looking down his nose at Communists, Blacks, Jews, and women, the assembled party is full of people who, as one of them acknowledges, “won’t mind very much that he’s dead.” But it could well be that members of Sir Henry’s immediate family—from his son, Charles, now the 12th baronet, to his daughter, Kate, come home from boarding school, to his fiancee, Lady Sarah—had the best reasons of all to kill him. Although real-life DCI Lilian Wyles of Scotland Yard is eager to enlist the help of the Queens of Crime, fictional DCI Richard Davidson, her partner on the case, won’t hear of it, and the pair’s dutiful, endless interrogations of Sir Henry’s family and staff shunt Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham to the sidelines, where they remain chatting among themselves to the very end; their detection is pretty much limited to elucidating a single clue that baffles the Scotland Yard sleuths.
Bonus: Readers can congratulate themselves on having the enlightened social attitudes the victim and suspects sorely lack.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798892420600
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
The pre–World War II ambiance provides an apt setting for some ingenious murders in a case worthy of the clever sleuth.
An aristocratic young mother proves a dab hand at solving murders in 1937.
Lady Georgiana O’Mara is a cousin to both the new King George VI and the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated to marry the rapacious Mrs. Simpson. She’s married to the Honorable Darcy O’Mara, heir to an Irish title, but they don’t have much money even though Darcy works for the government in a hush-hush position. Luckily, she’s the heir to her well-off godfather, who’s letting Georgie, Darcy, and their son, James, live in his home. Everything is going well until Georgie’s bossy sister-in-law, Fig, Duchess of Rannoch, sends a much-too-proper nanny to take care of James, and announces that she intends to visit herself to make sure things run as she insists they should. Thoroughly intimidated, Georgie unhappily puts up with her unwanted visitors. Darcy encourages Georgie to go to London to visit her friend Zou Zou, a Polish princess who might help her find a nanny more to her liking. When Georgie arrives at her friend’s house, Zou Zou is rushing off to a funeral for a young man who died in a tragic accident, but Georgie soon runs into another friend, Belinda, who’s just returned from Paris. Another young man has just died in an apparent accident, but there’s something that doesn’t sit well with Georgie about the deaths. The death of a third young man sets the alarm bells ringing, and a fourth death sends sirens blaring, urging Georgie to look for connections among the deceased. They were all Darcy’s age and all set to inherit estates. Why were they targeted for death?
The pre–World War II ambiance provides an apt setting for some ingenious murders in a case worthy of the clever sleuth.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641392
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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