An intriguing and engaging mystery—readers will hope for more adventures starring the redoubtable hero.
In this historical fiction sequel, a San Francisco journalist shows her resourcefulness and audacity after a tennis coach’s death.
Edward Zimmer, the publisher of cub reporter Jane Benjamin’s newspaper, and his companion, Sandy Abbott, are traveling to London to watch the 1939 Wimbledon games. San Francisco’s favorite daughter, Tommie O’Rourke, will be defending the city’s honor. Defend it she does, but at her moment of triumph, her coach, Edith Carlson, suddenly collapses and dies right there in the stands. Through luck and pluck, Jane has joined the traveling entourage and even wins the provisional confidence of Tommie and her brother, Frank. Meanwhile, Jane is wangling for a promotion to gossip columnist. While the group is sailing home on the Queen Mary, suspicions arise that Edith actually was murdered, and Jane is on the case. Enter the sad figure of Helen Carlson, the coach’s niece, a very troubled—if not mentally ill—woman who chooses suicide and is buried at sea with her aunt. Jane tries to solve all of these mysteries, reconciles (somewhat) with her mother, and gets ready for the next stage of her tumultuous life. Blanton-Stroud is a wonderful writer, and Jane is a compelling creation. Check out some of the lines in the enjoyable novel. After surprising a celebrity, “the photographers ran off like hyenas with bloody chunks of meat in their mouths.” Jane, desperate to hear crucial information, lent her “ears what remained of” her strength. The London weather is as “cold and drizzly as the eye of a sneeze.” There are many vivid flashbacks to Jane’s hardscrabble growing up in a 1930s Hooverville in California. Readers will understand that Jane’s childhood made her what she is now and is going to be in the future (see Nietzsche: “Whatever doesn’t kill me…”). And her troubled troubadour father had nonetheless a nobility to him (see Woody Guthrie).
An intriguing and engaging mystery—readers will hope for more adventures starring the redoubtable hero.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-407-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 always delightful heroine and her sleuthing family do not disappoint in this mélange of mysteries.
The fearless and soignée Phryne Fisher investigates several mysteries as intriguing as they are perilous in post–World War I Australia.
In addition to excellent taste in clothes and men, the Honourable Miss Fisher has something else: a disdain for rules that’s served her well as a private investigator. She can tell that something’s bothering Dot Williams, her lady's maid and companion, who reveals that an anonymous letter reading only REPENT! was left in Phryne’s mailbox, kicking off the first of her investigations. Her two adopted daughters, Jane and Ruth, are helping out at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind for a school project, and one of the teachers asks Jane to use her math skills to check over the institute's books, where it seems "there's something amiss." Meanwhile, Phryne drops in on Jeoffrey Bisset, a lecturer in classics and English, who invites her to dinner at his home in Williamstown the next evening. When the time comes, they enjoy each other more than the food, but Phryne finds herself involved in opium smuggling when an after-dinner stroll reveals a man stabbed to death on the beach. Phryne’s sometime lover Lin Chung, a respected leader in the Chinese community, is called to identify the body and resolves to look for whoever’s smuggling opium, a scourge in the community. Phryne sets her adopted son, Tinker, to investigate the anonymous letter while Jane and Ruth try to sniff out an embezzler at the Institute for the Blind. Reserving for herself the dangerous job of tracking down the murderous smugglers with a little help from her friends, Phryne uncovers some surprising answers.
The always delightful heroine and her sleuthing family do not disappoint in this mélange of mysteries.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781728279244
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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BOOK REVIEW
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