Truss faithfully re-creates both the ingenious appeal and the formulaic limitations of golden-age puzzlers.
Truss' third stroll down Memory Lane offers firm evidence that 1957 Brighton is packed with homicides.
In the space of one eventful evening, three locals—Barbara Ashley, the runner-up in the local Milk Board's Lactic Lovelies beauty contest; Andrew Inman of the Automobile Association; and Cedric Carbody, a celebrity contestant on the BBC radio show What’s Your Game?—are bashed and sliced to death with milk bottles. Sgt. Jim Brunswick, who’d looked forward to dating Barbara that very evening, is properly outraged; Inspector Geoffrey Steine, now that he’s finished his own brief stint on What’s Your Game? is mostly focused on the ice-cream sundae competition he’ll be judging; and Palmeira Groynes, the police station’s observant and efficient charlady, is preoccupied with the summit meeting of crime lords she’s arranging for her ex-lover Terence Chambers. So it falls mainly to Constable Peregrine Twitten to figure out what the victims had in common that would make someone attack them with such a bizarrely unlikely weapon. Guided partly by the very different clues he picks up from Mrs. Groynes, who nobody else believes is a master criminal, and Milk Girl Pandora Holden, who had eyes for him years ago, and partly by his cocksure sense of his own abilities, but never by any sense of decorum that would lead him to filter his monstrously tactless remarks to others, Twitten presses on as the body count rises to impossible heights before he finally identifies a killer who’s both unguessable and, well, unnoticeable.
Truss faithfully re-creates both the ingenious appeal and the formulaic limitations of golden-age puzzlers.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-597-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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