Historical descriptions of Niagara Falls are a bigger treat than a mystery replete with dead ends.
A call for help on a matter of law turns into a treacherous case of investigative work in 1890 New York.
Prudence MacKenzie and her partner, former Pinkerton agent Geoffrey Hunter, have formed an investigative law firm in New York City. A note from Prudence’s aunt, Lady Rotherton, sends the pair to Niagara Falls to help a friend of hers. Although the falls were made a state park in 1885, factories still mar the landscape five years later, and big money is sniffing around the possibilities for hydroelectric power. Lady Rotherton’s friend Lady Ernestine Hamilton, who lives on the Canadian side, is trying to protect a 17-year-old girl named Rowan Adderly, whose rapacious grandmother was horrified when her son married a beautiful Irish singer. Now Rowan, the couple’s daughter, is set to inherit a large fortune. When both her parents were presumed dead, Rowan was removed from boarding school and put into service. Now she’s hiding in a cabin in the woods with a blind man and his protective dog while her grandmother tries to have her declared illegitimate. Prudence and Geoffrey soon become involved in the hoopla surrounding the falls, led by Crazy Louie Whiting, who’s constantly building barrels in an attempt to successfully send a human over the falls. When the body of odd jobber Martin Fallow is found in a barrel supposedly containing a sheep, his death turns out to be murder. Losing no time, the sleuthing couple send for their secretary, Josiah Gregory, to investigate any relevant paperwork about the Adderlys and for tough and clever Amos Lang, another former Pinkerton, who gets a job with Crazy Louie. The shocking truth they uncover puts everyone involved in great danger.
Historical descriptions of Niagara Falls are a bigger treat than a mystery replete with dead ends.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3336-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.
A vainglorious viscount is murdered in this 1910-set mystery—Montgomery’s first novel for adults and the launch of the Stockingham & Pike series.
As the novel opens, narrator Stephen Pike, not yet 20 years old and fresh from a two-year stint at a London prison, finds himself in Cornwall at World’s End, taking a job as a second footman at a remote manor house. (So far, so Downton Abbey.) He arrives at a time of high anxiety: Lord Stockingham-Welt has seen to it that the windows of Tithe Hall have been boarded up in anticipation of Comet Halley’s appearance—“This time, it will be the end of the world,” he insists. The comet spares the earth, but the night doesn’t spare the viscount: The next morning, he’s found dead in his study, which was locked from the inside, with an ancestral crossbow’s bolt in his eye. Who better than un-alibied recent inmate Stephen to take the blame for the murder? To Stephen’s aid comes Miss Decima Stockingham, the viscount’s elderly great-aunt, who makes Downton Abbey’s Violet Crawley seem like an earth mother. A frustrated scientist, Miss Decima hated her late nephew—“Conrad stole my inheritance, my sister, my career…everything”—but she hates Stephen’s victimization more. The book’s ingenious reveal, which hinges on a long-buried Stockingham family secret, is reached through a combination of Miss Decima’s scientific-inquiry-fueled deductions and Stephen’s precocious puzzling (the story features both a hedge maze and a spot-the-difference-style brainteaser). The odd-couple intergenerational sleuthing duo is a welcome new arrival on the historical-mystery scene, with Stephen’s squeamishness about Miss Decima’s filterless fuming a mainstay of the book’s unremitting humor (Stephen: “I’d never heard language like it…and I’d just spent the last month sharing a bunk with a man called Filthy Mick”).
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063458772
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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