Dated, dusty, but well worth reading.
American journalist Davis (1864-1916) returns to the news with a long out-of-print crime novella emerging from the London fog in 1901, together with a much more straightforward story published 10 years earlier.
Davis’ sendup of contemporaneous crime fiction begins as Lt. Ripley Sears, the U.S. naval attaché to Russia, entertains the gentlemen he’s met in London’s exclusive Grill Club with an anecdote about getting so lost and confused in a recent pea-souper that he stumbled into a flat containing the dead bodies of the Earl of Chetney and his ladylove, Russian czarina Princess Zichy. Since the Earl’s brother, Lord Arthur Chetney, was spotted fleeing from the scene, and since that chronic debtor would have profited immensely from the Earl’s death, everyone assumes he’s the killer. But a Queen’s Messenger who serves as a courier for the Foreign Office begins a second story about a diamond necklace that Queen Victoria had intended to give as a gift to Princess Zichy, who stole it from him as they traveled together in the same railway compartment, and his frantic efforts to recover the treasure before anyone realized it had been stolen. And Chudleigh, a junior solicitor, tells a third story about Inspector Lyle’s attempt to identify the Earl’s murderer after Lord Arthur, confined in hospital after an accident, denies all responsibility. Just when it seems that these three tales are foggier than London, Davis pulls a surprisingly postmodern rabbit from his hat. Readers who find his ending too meta may still enjoy “Gallegher: A Newspaper Story,” which recounts the sleuthing adventures of a remarkably resourceful office boy who works, like Davis did, for the Philadelphia Press.
Dated, dusty, but well worth reading.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781728296234
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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