THE SOCIALITE'S GUIDE TO DEATH AND DATING

The death of a visitor to her latest party before he’s even left the Pinnacle Hotel gives New Yorker Evelyn Murphy another excuse to play detective.

It's 1958. Having already sent his young and very pregnant second wife, Elena, home separately, Judge Cliff Baker makes it only as far as the parking garage before someone injects him with a lethal dose of heroin. Nor is his body the extent of the discoveries that await Ev and her new lover, Pinnacle bellhop Malcolm Cooper, in the garage. When Det. Laurence Hodgson and his unsympathetic new partner, Det. McJimsey, arrive and pop the judge’s trunk, they find an agitated young woman inside. By the time she dies several days later, when she’s smothered in her bed at Manhattan General Hospital, Ev’s father, Pinnacle owner Mark Murphy, the third (or maybe fourth) richest man in the world, has returned from his latest trip, been shot up with a hefty dose of heroin, and been sent to Manhattan General, where he lies unconscious while someone strangles his visitor, Florence, Ev’s longtime maid. When Hodgson gets fired for failing to establish security protocols that might have saved Florence’s life, the unlovely McJimsey is left in charge of the case, and Ev visits Hodgson—telling him, “No coffee for me, thanks. Do you have champagne?”—to enlist him as her equally unofficial investigative partner. Though the period details are less thickly strewn than in The Socialite’s Guide to Murder (2022), the ending comes as quite a surprise.

The heroine’s serenely coy sensibility vividly evokes the 1950s.