Historical descriptions of Niagara Falls are a bigger treat than a mystery replete with dead ends.
A call for help on a matter of law turns into a treacherous case of investigative work in 1890 New York.
Prudence MacKenzie and her partner, former Pinkerton agent Geoffrey Hunter, have formed an investigative law firm in New York City. A note from Prudence’s aunt, Lady Rotherton, sends the pair to Niagara Falls to help a friend of hers. Although the falls were made a state park in 1885, factories still mar the landscape five years later, and big money is sniffing around the possibilities for hydroelectric power. Lady Rotherton’s friend Lady Ernestine Hamilton, who lives on the Canadian side, is trying to protect a 17-year-old girl named Rowan Adderly, whose rapacious grandmother was horrified when her son married a beautiful Irish singer. Now Rowan, the couple’s daughter, is set to inherit a large fortune. When both her parents were presumed dead, Rowan was removed from boarding school and put into service. Now she’s hiding in a cabin in the woods with a blind man and his protective dog while her grandmother tries to have her declared illegitimate. Prudence and Geoffrey soon become involved in the hoopla surrounding the falls, led by Crazy Louie Whiting, who’s constantly building barrels in an attempt to successfully send a human over the falls. When the body of odd jobber Martin Fallow is found in a barrel supposedly containing a sheep, his death turns out to be murder. Losing no time, the sleuthing couple send for their secretary, Josiah Gregory, to investigate any relevant paperwork about the Adderlys and for tough and clever Amos Lang, another former Pinkerton, who gets a job with Crazy Louie. The shocking truth they uncover puts everyone involved in great danger.
Historical descriptions of Niagara Falls are a bigger treat than a mystery replete with dead ends.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3336-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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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
Demands a careful reading and knowledge of the Victorian lady detective’s history.
A mystery that unwinds in reverse adds new twists to Thomas’ Sherlock Holmes–inspired series.
The new Charlotte Holmes novel continues the tense chess game that the gender-flipped Sherlock is playing with Moriarty and an incarcerated acquaintance turned villain. The events are narrated as a series of flashbacks interspersed with an interrogation in which Charlotte is under suspicion of murder. While her friend Inspector Treadles nervously observes, a senior policeman grills the unflappable detective about her recent movements. Even as she gives him a bland account of why she’s crisscrossed the English Channel in recent weeks, readers get drips of information about what she and her family and friends have been up to, all building to a reveal. Two other seemingly unrelated mystery subplots enter the picture, but it’s evident that new events and characters are connected to familiar ones from the past. With allusions to previous novels in the Lady Sherlock series and hat tips to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” and the Guy Ritchie movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the plot can be hard to follow, especially for new readers. The consistently well-drawn characters serve as an anchor, and the occasional glimpse of Charlotte’s love for her family and her lover, Lord Ingram Ashburton, adds a needed touch of warmth to the clever but clinical jigsaw structure of the mystery.
Demands a careful reading and knowledge of the Victorian lady detective’s history.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780593640432
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
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