MURDER ON FIFTH AVENUE

An upper-class midwife and an Irish Catholic police detective continue their unlikely alliance in a seventh murder investigation.

Sarah Brandt defied her wealthy family to marry a doctor and become a midwife. Now a self-supporting widow, she has good relations with her parents but is still very surprised when her father, Felix Decker, calls upon her friend Detective Sgt. Frank Malloy to solve the murder of a fellow Knickerbocker Club member. When Chilton Devries was found dead at the club, his death first seemed to be by natural causes. But a small stab wound in his back proves that he was murdered. Malloy is not welcomed at the Devries mansion, but between his talks with the servants and the calls Sarah and her mother pay on the not overly sad widow, they manage to dig up some promising leads. Devries had a mistress; he spent the night before his death with her; his son and daughter-in-law hated him; and he had a number of business enemies. As if all of that weren’t enough, he tried to get a Mafia Don to murder his daughter-in-law’s mother. Behind the facade of wealth and high society lurk some very nasty secrets. In turn-of-the-century New York, where police have little interest in arresting the wealthy and well-connected, it will be up to Malloy, Sarah and her father to find the killer and decide how to discreetly punish the perpetrator.

Thompson (Murder on Sisters' Row, 2011, etc.) once more weaves the class differences and casual bigotry of the period into a mystery with some neat twists.