Schellman transports readers to Regency-era England and tantalizes them with a traditional whodunit.
Fledgling Regency sleuth Lady Lily Adler solves another baffling murder, this time battling…a ghost!
Now that he’s supported Lily in her widow’s grief and abetted her in unraveling two perplexing murder mysteries, Capt. Jack Hartley, the stalwart friend of Lily’s late husband, Freddy, has decided to return to his first love, the sea. After Lily and friends Ned and Ofelia Carroway bid him a fond farewell, they stop at the home of Lily’s Aunt Eliza in Hampshire before a planned return to London. Eliza and her close friend Susan Clarke can’t resist suggesting that Lily would be a perfect match for Matthew Spencer, owner of nearby Morestead Park, before the discussion turns to accounts of a terrifying local ghost. Spencer is indeed courtly and attentive to Lily, but their initial meeting is interrupted by the unctuous Mr. Wright. Scarcely has he introduced himself when his distraught daughter, Selina, bursts in with the news that Mrs. Wright has been murdered by “the lady in gray,” the aforementioned ghost. The intrepid, methodical Lily immediately sets about unraveling the mystery, abetted in Jack’s absence by Ofelia and Ned. Confounding the case is the fact that the victim’s door was locked from the inside. Could the clandestine affair between Selina’s brother, Thomas, and one of the maids be an important piece of the puzzle? The plotline of Lily’s continued self-discovery and empowerment continues in this third adventure, stitched into the period tapestry in ways that never overshadow the murder mystery.
Schellman transports readers to Regency-era England and tantalizes them with a traditional whodunit.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63910-078-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
A fitting finale to a marvelously entertaining series full of finely drawn characters often scarred by the horrors of war.
Farewell, Maisie Dobbs.
Once a maid in Lady Rowan Compton’s household, then a university student, a nurse, and an agent of the British Secret Service, Maisie has blossomed into a psychologist and private investigator. Her first husband, James Compton, died while test-flying an experimental aircraft. The end of World War II finds her living in the Dower House of the Compton estate with her second husband, Mark Scott—an American diplomat—and their adopted daughter, Anna, and comforting her former mother-in-law, Lady Rowan, who’s just lost her own spouse. When she hears there are squatters living in the Comptons’ London house, Maisie heads to Belgravia, where she finds four teenagers in residence along with an ailing Will Beale, the son of Maisie’s business partner, who survived a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Checking with her old friend DCI Robbie MacFarlane, whose help she’d asked in finding the previously missing Will, she gets a bad feeling about Robbie’s interest in the squatters. Worried about the youngsters, who were part of some secret government project, Maisie talks them into letting her into the house to help Will. When they admit they witnessed the murder of a Nazi sympathizer that the government wants covered up, she moves the group to a safer place. Her investigation of the murder discloses a mass of nasty secrets. One of the teens found a packet of letters under the floorboards of the Compton house belonging to one of Maisie’s fellow maids, killed in an explosion, who had a child with James when they were very young. Finding that child, who was put up for adoption, may be the most challenging task Maisie’s ever undertaken.
A fitting finale to a marvelously entertaining series full of finely drawn characters often scarred by the horrors of war.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781641296069
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
