A juicy Roaring ’20s crime yarn set in red-hot Manhattan.
Who slew the Jazz Age party girl? This novel, based on a true story, investigates the crime.
After poring over the New York Daily News of March 15, 1923, for the latest developments in the sensational Pettit-Wells murder trial, Ella Bradford catches a subway from her Harlem apartment to West 57th Street and her job as a maid to “Miss Dottie” King, whom she discovers dead in her luxurious bed. When ambitious News reporter Julia Harpman, who happens to be covering the Pettit-Wells trial on Long Island, learns of the murder of the flapper and sometime actress known as the Broadway Butterfly, she rushes to cover that as well. The official investigation falls to veteran Inspector John D. Coughlin, whose steel-trap mind recalls other brutal crimes on West 57th. Though it focuses on three protagonists who are all invested in solving the mystery, this tale is less a whodunit than a lurid crime story set in the Mad Decade and presented from multiple perspectives. DiVello shrewdly draws parallels between Julia’s hardscrabble struggles in a misogynistic era and Dot’s use of her sexuality to rise in society, and she crafts an intriguing relationship between Julia and Coughlin, prickly yet mutually respectful. Race and class factor into Ella’s anxiety over her proximity to the crime, since she’s Black and all the other characters are White. DiVello maintains a breakneck pace from one brief, datelined chapter to the next. Her pulpy, over-the-top prose credibly evokes the era’s crime magazines, while her fidelity to the characters and the well-documented facts surrounding the unsolved murder give the story extra interest. Her meticulous care extends to a lengthy postscript tracking the subsequent lives of all those involved.
A juicy Roaring ’20s crime yarn set in red-hot Manhattan.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781662510137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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