SAINT PETER'S TEAR

In this second installment of a mystery series, a rich socialite is threatened with death aboard the Queen Mary.

Alexandra Durant, a young psychology postdoctoral candidate–turned–amateur sleuth, is called to Eisenhower-era New York City by wealthy socialite Mrs. Adelaide Dabney in order to investigate a bizarre chain of events. Dabney is a 90-year-old widow beloved by everybody. While she’s innocently planning an overseas voyage to attend the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco, she’s begun receiving ominous notes warning her not to make the trip. At first, Alexandra seems surrounded by potential suspects: Dabney’s lawyer/bodyguard Glen Cleary; her great-niece, the beautiful but unemployed actress Jacqueline Lane; Jackie’s fiance, Greg Hopper; Dabney’s pompous and overbearing nephew, Philip; and even Madame Delavue, the fortuneteller who’s gained the older woman’s confidence. As the plot moves onboard the Queen Mary, the suspects increase, including both Dabney’s old friend Mr. Hendry and an oddly belligerent entomologist named Spencer Seward (who “always enjoyed squashing bugs”). While observing all these characters and trying to sort through their varying backstories, Alexandra continues to be haunted by her own tale, both her involvement in the traumatic prior case that originally brought her to Dabney’s attention and her ongoing worries about her mother, who’s in a care facility suffering from increasing memory loss. As the clues continue to multiply, Alexandra wonders if the writer of those menacing notes is a member of Dabney’s inner circle—and if there might be a murderer on board.

Giebfried and Wells skillfully mix all of these standard plot elements into something that feels fresh and snappy. A great deal of this can be attributed to the wise decision to tell the entire story from the first-person perspective of Alexandra, by far the tale’s best-realized character, a young woman haunted by her mother’s illness-induced loss of memory and her own inability to forget things. Alexandra is a sharp and uncompromising lens through which readers view what is otherwise a fairly one-dimensional supporting cast of suspects. The luxury liner atmosphere is well captured (“By the time the Grand Marnier crêpes arrived with flames dancing atop them,” Alexandra “was feeling particularly well-fed and content”), and the authors do a good job of planting red herrings. But some of the hints can be heavy-handed. For example, when Seward describes the ladybird spider—“The mother lays eighty or so eggs, then digests herself after they’re hatched so her spiderlings can feed off her body”—readers won’t need a road map to see the parallels with Dabney. Yet the book’s biggest flaw is its most obvious: Its captivating but by-the-numbers plot in no way justifies its enormous length. Readers will find it difficult to avoid the feeling that this is a 300-page novel buried somewhere in 561 pages. Fortunately, thanks to the authors’ narrative zest, even this misstep is enjoyable. The characters and dialogue keep things moving along even after most of the actual tension has dissipated.

An immensely entertaining, if overlong, shipboard tale starring a striking sleuth who “remembers things.”