Review: Murder Crossed Her Mind by Stephen Spotswood

Review: Murder Crossed Her Mind by Stephen SpotswoodMurder Crossed Her Mind (Pentecost and Parker #4) by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Pentecost and Parker #4
Pages: 384
Published by Doubleday Books on December 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The latest action-packed installment in the Nero Award-winning Pentecost & Parker Mystery series follows Lillian and Will tracking the suspicious disappearance of a woman who might have known too much. From the author of Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin.
Vera Bodine, an elderly shut-in with an exceptional memory, has gone missing and famed detective Lillian Pentecost and her crackerjack assistant Willowjean "Will" Parker have been hired to track her down. But the New York City of 1947 can be a dangerous place, and there's no shortage of people who might like to get ahold of what's in Bodine's head.
Does her disappearance have to do with the high-profile law firm whose secrets she still keeps; the violent murder of a young woman, with which Bodine had lately become obsessed; or is it the work she did with the FBI hunting Nazi spies intent on wartime sabotage? Any and all are on the suspect list, including their client, Forest Whitsun, hotshot defense attorney and no friend to Pentecost and Parker.
The clock is ticking to get Bodine back alive, but circumstances conspire to pull both investigators away from the case. Will is hot on the trail of a stickup team who are using her name--and maybe her gun--for their own ends. While Lillian again finds herself up against murder-obsessed millionaire Jessup Quincannon, who has discovered a secret from her past--something he plans to use to either rein the great detective in . . . or destroy her.
To solve this mystery, and defeat their own personal demons, the pair will have to go nose-to-nose with murderous gangsters, make deals with conniving federal agents, confront Nazi spies, and bend their own ethical rules to the point of breaking. Before time runs out for everyone.

My Review:

It’s still 1947 in this fourth entry in the Pentecost and Parker series, not too long after the conclusion of the previous book, Secrets Typed in Blood, and still very much under the influence of those events.

Willowjean Parker, is private detective Lillian Pentecost’s right-hand woman, still a bit sensitive about her roots as a ‘cirky girl’ and still in a bit of mourning for the people she left behind when she ran away FROM the circus after running away TO that circus to escape her abusive father.

But she’s proud of her accomplishments as a licensed private detective, and embarrassed, chagrined and downright ashamed when she gets mugged by a couple of two-bit con artists working Coney Island, getting coshed with her own sap and losing her favorite purse with its IDs, keys, and brand new – and registered – gun when she breaks up what she believed was an attempted rape – only to get suckered into a situation that she really should have seen coming a mile away.

Which turns out to be a kind of metaphor for this whole case, as in her haste to cover up her own mess she falls right into an even bigger one – and very nearly loses her boss’ trust into the bargain.

It starts as a missing persons case, brought to Pentecost and Parker by their least favorite lawyer, Forest Whitsun. When Whitsun had Pentecost on the stand in their latest confrontation, he implied that she was not just physically incapacitated by her progressing multiple sclerosis, but mentally compromised into that very bad bargain.

Having him show up at their door as a prospective client, that he trusts their expertise enough for him to ask Pentecost to help him locate a missing friend, is rather a surprise. Although not nearly as much of a surprise as discovering that Whitsun has actual friends and that any of them are female and almost, sorta/kinda, mother-figures in a life that seems bereft of all emotional contacts.

That his friend was a hoarder is a shock to everyone’s system. That she was so famous for her prodigious memory that she was the ace-in-the-hole for a high-powered white shoe law firm AND was recruited by the FBI during the late war is an even bigger shock.

That Will finds her body hidden in the piles of detritus choking her apartment – not so much.

But the ensuing shenanigans raise questions about Pentecost’s history, bring up the specters of one of her greatest enemies and poke holes in a whole lot of people’s lives. Because it’s pretty clear that Vera Bodine’s death was related to some secret that someone felt they had to kill to keep.

But the woman knew so many that it’s hard for even Pentecost and Parker to determine which of the many, many motives surrounding this very secretive woman was the one that caused her death.

Before it causes, not a second woman to die, but a third. Or perhaps a fourth.

Escape Rating A++: Murder Crossed Her Mind was an actual, literally, honest-to-goodness one sitting read for me. I started it thinking I’d read for an hour or so before bed, and then just stayed there reading. And stayed. And STAYED. Until it was done nearly four hours later. Hence that A++ rating because I simply could not put this down until Pentecost and Parker knew everything and staged a great – but still slightly speculative – reveal at the end.

Even though they, and I, both know that those things work better on TV than they do in a real case. Then again, their lawyer-client has been compared to Perry Mason, so the TV-worthy ending fits right into the feel of, well, everything.

What continues to make this series shine is the voice of its narrator, ‘Will’ Parker, who serves as Lillian Pentecost’s right-hand and leg-woman, as well as, increasingly as the series goes on, her investigative partner.

What makes this series, let’s call it ‘inspired by’ by the classic Nero Wolfe series, is that while the stories are set in the immediate post-World War II period, and is clearly heading straight into the strait-jacket of the 1950s, Will’s voice feels more contemporary to us even as she observes the times in which she lives.

Which works because, while we know the date of the period Will is narrating for the story, we don’t know when she’s narrating it FROM. It’s obviously later, she’s clearly older, sadder and wiser, but the world changed a LOT from the late 1940s to, for example, the 1970s and 1980s. Will’s in her 20s when this story takes place, so the possibility that she’s looking back from 30 or 40 years on and is still alive to do so is quite plausible and allows her to be a bit outside her time.

What made the case work, both as a mystery and as an interesting story in its own right, was the mysterious figure of Perseverance Bodine at its heart. She had the gift of perfect recall, and that gift gave her a financially secure life while allowing her to work in the shadows. But as a woman, it was all too easy for her to be seen as a mere helper with a freakishly useful talent rather than as the mover and shaker she could have been – or perhaps should have been.

It was also a bit different because it was never about what enemies Vera might have made – because she didn’t. Instead, it was about which secret someone could least afford her to reveal, which made the investigation just that much more complicated.

I was enthralled from the very first page, and this one just didn’t let go of me until the end. I’ve been just as caught up in every single one of the Pentecost and Parker mysteries so far, from their very first outing in Fortune Favors the Dead, through Murder Under her Skin, Secrets Typed in Blood and now this latest entry in the series, which dammit ends on a ginormous cliffhanger. So there’d better be a FIFTH book in this fantastic series! I just hope we don’t have too long to wait…

Review: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

Review: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David GrannThe Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
Narrator: Dion Graham
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: history, nonfiction, true crime
Pages: 352
Length: 8 hours and 28 minutes
Published by Doubleday Books, Random House Audio on May 11, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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From the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.   On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship The Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, The Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.   Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.  

My Review:

Fiction has to be plausible, while nonfiction just has to be true. The story of HMS Wager – or more properly the story of her doomed voyage, disastrous wreck and the against all odds recovery of even a fraction of her crew – is so far over the top that we might not accept it as fiction – except possibly as sheer horror. That this voyage, and all of the extremes the crew passed through and even survived in the tiniest part, really happened carries the reader forward with them even when the conditions are so harrowing that many will want to turn their eyes away.

But man’s inhumanity to man – even without the type of disastrous conditions the crew of the Wager endured – is an oft told tale and not just of the sea. What carries this over the top is its denouement. Not just that some survived to be rescued, but that of those survivors, only ten men out of the original company of nearly three hundred lived to tell the tale. And they all seemed to tell entirely different tales, each attempting to justify their actions after the ship wrecked off the coast of present-day Chile.

The Wreck of the Wager, the frontispiece from John Byron’s account

The crew of the Wager mutinied after the terrible wreck. The Captain wanted to go forward with their original mission, in spite of having lost, at that point, 2/3rds of his crew, his ship, and quite possibly both his authority and a piece of his mind. One natural leader, the gunner John Bulkley, had a plan for navigating the Straits of Magellan in one of the smaller boats remaining to the castaways. Bulkley had drive, the trust of more of the men, a plan and a clear direction for safety, while Captain Cheap only had waning authority and wrecked trust.

Bulkley and his contingent sailed east. Cheap and his loyalists sailed west. Both returned home, with vastly differing accounts of the terrible events that took place on what the castaways had dubbed ‘Wager Island’. The court martial should have been epic – and it should have decided the truth – or at least a truth – for posterity.

But the jury on precisely what happened on Wager Island, whether the mutiny was justified or was even, technically, a mutiny at all isn’t even out because it never went in. The Admiralty chose not to pursue any of the possible charges against anyone who returned, outside of assigning blame for the wrecking of the Wager herself. Not because there were no charges to answer, but because those answers would have shot cannonballs through the British Navy’s reputation and its justifications for its so-called ‘civilizing’ conquests that do not hold up to the light of day now.

And clearly didn’t then, either, even if the Admiralty refused to acknowledge it.

Reality Rating A: The Wager is a terrible story told terribly, terribly well, made even better by the excellence of the voice narration by Dion Graham. His voice carried me through a story that, while compelling, was so very dark – all the more so for being a true story – that I would have turned aside without him.

There are three parts to The Wager’s epic narrative. It begins with the runup to the expedition that HMS Wager was intended to be a small part of. It reads as doomed from the beginning, an endless delay of money and bureaucracy, intending to be a salvo in a made-up war (the War of Jenkins’ Ear). The mission as a whole ended in a kind of pyrrhic victory, but by then the Wager had long since wrecked.

The heart – and heartbreak – of the story is in the conditions on Wager Island. Conditions that quickly break down into a chaos of failed discipline and desperation that recalls The Lord of the Flies. Not that conditions aboard HMS Wager weren’t desperate before the wreck, but the privation they had already experienced made the starvation, madness and despair while castaways just that much more difficult to bear.

As I listened to Dion Graham’s marvelous voice, the story kept building and building its recital of how truly awful the situation was, to the point where it reminded me of the privations described in Emma Donoghue’s Haven – without nearly as much reference to religion or G-d. By the time they left the island, there was no G-d to be found – no matter how much Bulkley searched for one.

What fascinated me was the rescue – or rescues as it turned out – and just how much the story morphed and changed when exposed to the light of ‘grub street’ journalism. There is very little ‘truth’ to be found by the time the conflicting accounts of the survivors and the even more sensational exaggerations of the press came into play. This is a story that leaves more questions than answers. Humans do not make reliable eyewitnesses – particularly in cases where each has a stake in saving their own skins – or necks.

The Wager isn’t the kind of adventure on the high seas that many of her crew read before they undertook the voyage. It’s an ultimately riveting, desperately tragic, terribly contentious account of a walk – or rather a sail – through the darkest places of men’s hearts and souls. A tale from which it is impossible to turn one’s eyes away, no matter how much one might be tempted to step aside. Which is only fitting, as the crew of HMS Wager could not either.

Review: Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen Spotswood

Review: Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen SpotswoodSecrets Typed in Blood: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Pentecost and Parker #3
Pages: 384
Published by Doubleday Books on December 13, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads


In the newest entry into the Nero Award-winning Parker & Pentecost Mystery series (my new favorite sleuthing duo-- Sarah Weinman, The New York Times Book Review), Lillian and Will are hot on the trail of a serial killer whose murders are stranger than fiction.

New York City, 1947: For years, Holly Quick has made a good living off of murder, filling up the pages of pulp detective magazines with gruesome tales of revenge. Now someone is bringing her stories to life and leaving a trail of blood-soaked bodies behind. With the threat of another murder looming, and reluctant to go to the police, Holly turns to the best crime-solving duo in or out of the pulps, Willowjean "Will" Parker and her boss, famed detective Lillian Pentecost.
The pair are handed the seemingly-impossible task of investigating three murders at once without tipping off the cops or the press that the crimes are connected. A tall order made even more difficult by the fact that Will is already signed up to spend her daylight hours undercover as a guileless secretary in the hopes of digging up a lead on an old adversary, Dr. Olivia Waterhouse.
But even if Will is stuck in pencil skirts and sensible shoes, she's not about to let her boss have all the fun. Soon she's diving into an underground world of people obsessed with murder and the men and women who commit them. Can the killer be found in the Black Museum Club, run by a philanthropist whose collection of grim murder memorabilia may not be enough to satisfy his lust for the homicidal? Or is it Holly Quick's pair of editors, who read about murder all day, but clearly aren't telling the full story?
With victims seemingly chosen at random and a murderer who thrives on spectacle, the case has the great Lillian Pentecost questioning her methods. But whatever she does, she'd better do it fast. Holly Quick has a secret, too and it's about to bring death right to Pentecost and Parker's doorstep.

My Review:

The first book in the Pentecost and Parker series, the utterly marvelous Fortune Favors the Dead, won the 2021 Nero Award for “the best American Mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.” And it’s probably the most on-the-nose recipient of the award since it was won by Murder in E Minor by Robert Goldsborough, which was an actual Wolfe story.

Why? Because Pentecost and Parker are very much in the style of Nero Wolfe and his right hand – and frequently leg-man Archie Goodwin, along right along with their shared East Coast brownstone setting.

One of the many eccentric things about Wolfe was that he endeavored to never leave the brownstone. Goodwin went everywhere for him, gathered all the clues and evidence at his boss’ behest, and then genius Wolfe put it all together.

Wolfe could leave the brownstone, he just very strongly preferred not to and was more than enough of a genius that he generally got his way.

Lillian Pentecost, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t leave her brownstone nearly as much as she does. She has multiple sclerosis, MS, and the progressive disease is progressing in fits and starts. She’s not going to get better and she knows it. The best she can do is hold it at bay, and one of the best ways to accomplish that is to reduce the stress in her life.

Something which she is utterly incapable of. What she attempts to do instead is send Willowjean Parker out and about as her right hand and leg woman, to bring those same clues and evidence back to her brownstone to help her put it all together.

And there’s more to put together in this case than Will Parker first has a handle on, starting with the client. On a case that Parker can’t even figure out why Ms. Pentecost took. Along with the reason her boss is willing to not just put up with but actually honor all the very strange and downright hamstringing conditions that said client wrapped around it.

Holly Quick writes crime stories. As those are just the kind of thing that Will Parker likes to read, it’s not a surprise that Parker has read quite a few of Quick’s stories, even if she didn’t know Quick was writing them.

In the 1940s, writing crime stories was not exactly a field open to women. (Rather like writing science fiction stories.) The pulp magazines of the time knew better than to present a whole bunch of blood and guts under a female byline. So they didn’t. In fact, Holly Quick wrote under a veritable plethora of pen names, both to disguise how much of a single issue was actually the product of a single pen, and to let readers believe that all those stories about evil lurking in the hearts of men were written by one.

But Holly Quick had a third reason for hiding her identity – one that Lillian Pentecost sees immediately but that Will Parker has not yet sussed out. And it’s that hidden reason that convinces Pentecost to take the case, and keeps her from keeping her partner as informed as she should be about what they are really investigating.

What they have is fascinating enough. Someone is taking Holly’s stories and re-enacting them as real murders. To paraphrase Ian Fleming, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action,” or in this case the pattern of a serial killer.

The question is whether Pentecost and Parker can figure out who is doing it without letting Holly Quick’s real secret out of its old and rather fraying bag. Or whether it’s already too late – whether for one, the other or both.

Escape Rating A-: Both of Pentecost and Parker’s previous cases, Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin, have dealt rather explicitly with Parker’s past as an abused child who literally ran away and joined the circus. It’s the knife-throwing skills she learned there that saved Pentecost’s life and led to their partnership.

But by this point in Parker’s life, she is fully invested in her career with Pentecost as a licensed private detective. Which doesn’t mean that she doesn’t still suffer from impostor syndrome when Pentecost starts keeping secrets about the case from her. Because we view the story from inside Parker’s head, her discomfort and self-doubts become ours, and make the middle of the case a bit hard to read.

(I desperately wanted to be reassured that all would be well but didn’t want to spoil the ending. Fortunately, the worst of that bit didn’t last long and then it was off to the races – against death – again.)

What made this case interesting wasn’t the obvious case. The whole ‘life imitates art imitates life’ thing, where a serial killer recreates an author’s or an artist’s work through murder is not exactly a new face on the barroom floor. It’s been done before, and countless times at that. This was an interesting take on that trope, but not a unique one.

What was interesting was the case underneath the case, the reason why Lillian Pentecost took it in the first place. And that kept me guessing not just because Holly Quick’s secret was fascinating, but because of the way she dealt with her own life in keeping that secret. And the way that Lillian Pentecost was willing to help her keep it and what that hinted at in Pentecost’s own past.

So come for the mystery. Stay for the stresses and strains on this fascinating partnership. And try not to think too hard about their cook, Mrs. Campbell, and her preparation methods for haggis – which make the backyard look rather like a crime scene. All part of a day’s – or more likely several night’s – work for Pentecost and Parker.

It’s clear from the ending of Secrets Typed in Blood that there are plenty more cases on the horizon for this duo. And I can’t wait to read them.

Review: Murder Under Her Skin by Stephen Spotswood

Review: Murder Under Her Skin by Stephen SpotswoodMurder Under Her Skin (Pentecost and Parker, #2) by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Pentecost and Parker #2
Pages: 368
Published by Doubleday Books on December 7, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

Someone's put a blade in the back of the Amazing Tattooed Woman, and Willowjean "Will" Parker's former knife-throwing mentor has been stitched up for the crime. To uncover the truth, Will and her boss, world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost, travel south into a snakepit of old grudges, small-town crime, and secrets worth killing for.

New York, 1946: The last time Will Parker let a case get personal, she walked away with a broken face, a bruised ego, and the solemn promise never again to let her heart get in the way of her job. But she called Hart and Halloway's Travelling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus's tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go. To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all. The two swiftly find themselves lost in a funhouse of lies as Will begins to realize that her former circus compatriots aren't playing it straight, and that her murdered friend might have been hiding a lot of secrets beneath all that ink. Dodging fistfights, firebombs, and flying lead, Will puts a lot more than her heart on the line in the search of the truth. Can she find it before someone stops her ticker for good? Step right up! Murder Under Her Skin is a delightfully hardboiled high-wire act starring two daring heroines dead set on justice.

My Review:

The first book in this series, Fortune Favors the Dead, opened the partnership between private investigator Lillian Pentecost and former ‘cirky girl’ Willowjean Parker with Parker throwing a knife into the back of the man attempting to assault Pentecost.

The story in Murder Under Her Skin takes Will Parker, along with Lillian Pentecost, back to the place where Will learned how to throw that knife with intent, aim and a whole lot of nerve.

Will’s former mentor, the knife thrower Valentin Kalishenko, has been accused of murdering one of Hart and Halloway’s Travelling Circus and Sideshow’s sideshow attractions. Ruby Donner, the circus’ “Amazing Tattooed Woman”, is dead. With one of Kalishenko’s knives in her back.

The evidence is all circumstantial, but the local townspeople would much rather that someone in the circus killed one of their own rather than one of the townspeople being accused. The circus performers, one and all, are just as certain that whatever happened, Kalishenko didn’t do it.

The man left his knives everywhere. Anyone could have picked one up to strike the fatal blow. But Kalishenko has no alibi. He doesn’t even remember where he spent the night – only that he spent it in an alcoholic blackout.

A not uncommon event – but an exceedingly inconvenient one. At least for Kalishenko.

The circus’ owner asks for Lillian Pentecost’s help in figuring out who really done it. A help that Pentecost feels duty-bound to provide after the events in the previous book. Will wants to help her former mentor, and needs to help get her friends, her former found family, out of the jam they are in. And just wants justice for Ruby.

Along the way, Will discovers that her home in the circus was the kind of home that you can’t go back to again. She can and does help, even though the discovery that she’s no longer a member of the family breaks her heart.

Escape Rating A+: The Pentecost and Parker series, or at least this particular entry in it, is one of the most satisfying but also most unexpected book babies ever. If Rex Stout’s classic Fer-de-Lance (the first Nero Wolfe book) had a book baby with Phryne Fisher, particularly Blood and Circuses, the resulting book would be Murder Under Her Skin.

The comparison with Fer-de-Lance struck me in the first book because the setup of the partnership is so similar. Will becomes the legwoman and principal “active” investigator for Lillian Pentecost in much the same way that Archie Goodwin does for Nero Wolfe. The difference is that one could claim that Wolfe’s desire not to stir from his New York brownstone feels voluntary, while Lillian Pentecost’s continuing battle against the onset of multiple sclerosis is a cup she would gladly pass if only she could.

Wolfe won’t go out and Pentecost shouldn’t go out but the result is the same. Being a private detective requires that someone go out and tail suspects, occasionally fight with evildoers, and have clandestine meetings whose location can’t be dictated or controlled. Will Parker takes care of all those things for Lillian Pentecost and whatever else her boss needs to can’t quite manage for herself no matter how much she wishes she could.

But this case takes Pentecost out of her familiar Boston home and haunts while pulling Parker back to hers. It’s not just that the circus is currently stopped in the tiny town of Stoppard, Virginia, but that the circus was Parker’s home and refuge for years. She knows these people and they know her, both for good and for bad.

The case has more facets than it first appears – which is what made it so marvelously convoluted to follow.

Ruby was murdered, Kalishenko was stitched up. It’s up to Pentecost and Parker to prove it. Then the case gets bigger and wider as it’s revealed that the failing circus was in Stoppard because it’s the place where Ruby grew up. Meaning that she knew everyone in town and everyone knew her. And that she might have left both friendships and grudges behind her.

Even that isn’t complicated enough, as the more Will digs into Ruby’s past and the circus they both once called home, the more threads and tendrils reach out to faraway places and very dangerous people.

In the end the case is considerably larger than anyone ever expected. And that’s what made the unravelling of it so much hard-boiled noir-ish fun to follow.

Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker have turned out to be a fascinating and delightful pair of hard-boiled investigators. Fortune Favors the Dead was utterly marvelous and Murder Under Her Skin continues that streak. I hope they have plenty more mysteries to solve in the future!

Review: A Tip for the Hangman by Allison Epstein

Review: A Tip for the Hangman by Allison EpsteinA Tip for the Hangman by Allison Epstein
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: espionage, historical fiction, historical mystery, thriller
Pages: 384
Published by Doubleday Books on February 9, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads


Christopher Marlowe, a brilliant aspiring playwright, is pulled into the duplicitous world of international espionage on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. A many-layered historical thriller combining state secrets, intrigue, and romance.

England, 1585. In Kit Marlowe's last year at Cambridge, he receives an unexpected visitor: Queen Elizabeth's spymaster, who has come with an unorthodox career opportunity. Her Majesty's spies are in need of new recruits, and Kit's flexible moral compass has drawn their attention. Kit, a scholarship student without money or prospects, accepts the offer, and after his training the game is on. Kit is dispatched to the chilly manor where Mary, Queen of Scots is under house arrest, to act as a servant in her household and keep his ear to the ground for a Catholic plot to put Mary on the throne.
While observing Mary, Kit learns more than he bargained for. The ripple effects of his service to the Crown are far-reaching and leave Kit a changed man. But there are benefits as well. The salary he earns through his spywork allows him to mount his first play, and over the following years, he becomes the toast of London's raucous theatre scene. But when Kit finds himself reluctantly drawn back into the uncertain world of espionage, conspiracy, and high treason, he realizes everything he's worked so hard to attain--including the trust of the man he loves--could vanish before his very eyes.
Pairing modern language with period detail, Allison Epstein brings Elizabeth's privy council, Marlowe's lovable theatre troupe, and the squalor of sixteenth-century London to vivid, teeming life as Kit wends his way behind the scenes of some of Tudor history's most memorable moments. At the center of the action is Kit himself--an irrepressible, irreverent force of nature. Thrillingly written, full of poetry and danger, A Tip for the Hangman brings an unforgettable protagonist to new life, and makes a centuries-old story feel utterly contemporary.

My Review:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” Whoops. Wrong book. Right concept, but very much the wrong book. Much too early.

Elizabethan England only seems like a Golden Age because we’re looking back at it. Because history is written by the victors, and in this case the victor was Elizabeth Tudor, Gloriana herself.

Anonymous 16th century portrait, believed to be Christopher Marlowe

What history glosses over are the dirty deeds done, whether or not they are dirt cheap, by unscrupulous men in dark places who pretend they are working for the good of their country – even if they are just out for the main chance.

Christopher Marlowe, often referred to as Kit, was a comet blazing across the English stage just as William Shakespeare was getting his start. It’s even possible, although unlikely, that Marlowe actually was Shakespeare. He’s got the credentials for it and the timing is possible.

On the condition that Marlowe faked his own rather suspicious death in a barroom brawl. We’ll probably never know.

But this book, this story wrapped around not one but several tips for any number of hangmen, leads the reader – and Kit Marlowe – to that suspicious barroom brawl by a road that is surprising, circuitous and shrouded in secrets. The kind of secrets that brought one queen to her end and saved another’s kingdom.

Escape Rating A+: A Tip for the Hangman is the best kind of historical fiction, the kind where the reader feels the dirt under their fingernails, the grit under their own feet – and the smells in their own nostrils.

It’s also the kind that immerses the reader in the era it portrays. We’re right there with Marlowe, a poor scholarship student at Cambridge, as he becomes Doctor Faustus to his own personal Mephistopheles a decade before he wrote his most enduring play.

Depiction of Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I, Queen of England.

It’s hard to get past that image, even though we only see it in retrospect, as the Queen’s Spymaster and Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham, recruits the young, impoverished and most importantly clever Marlowe into his network of agents and informants with one aim in mind.

To bring down Elizabeth’s great rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.

A recruitment which ultimately becomes Mary’s end. But eventually also Marlowe’s as well.

Marlowe spends the entire book dancing on the edge of a knife, trying to forget that he’ll be cut no matter which way he falls and ignoring the forces around him, along with his own increasing world-weariness, that guarantee he will fall sooner or later.

There’s something about this period, the Tudor and Stuart era of English history, that has always captivated me. This book does a fantastic job of drawing the reader into the cut and thrust not of politics so much as the skullduggery that lies underneath it.

As I was reading A Tip for the Hangman, my mind dragged up two series that I loved that feature the same period and have many characters that overlap this book. Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age puts an urban fantasy/portal twist on this period and includes both Marlowe and Shakespeare as featured characters, while Dorothy Dunnett’s marvelous Lymond series focuses on a character who spies on many of the same people that Marlowe does here, most notably Mary, Queen of Scots. Lymond’s frequent second, third and fourth thoughts about the life he has fallen into echo Marlowe in the depths of regret and even despair.

A Tip for the Hangman is a fantastic book for those looking for their history and historical fiction to be “warts and all” – to immerse the reader in life as it was lived and not just the deeds and doings of the high and mighty. Because when it comes to conveying a more nuanced version of life as a hard-scrabbling playwright living hand to mouth and fearing that the hand would get cut off this feels like an absorbing story of fiction being the lie that tells, if not THE absolute truth then absolutely a certain kind of truth.

I would also say, “Read it and weep” for Kit Marlowe and what he might have been if he’d lived. Instead, I’ll just say “READ IT!”

Review: Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

Review: Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen SpotswoodFortune Favors the Dead (Pentecost and Parker, #1) by Stephen Spotswood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, thriller
Series: Pentecost and Parker #1
Pages: 336
Published by Doubleday Books on October 27, 2020
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

Introducing Pentecost and Parker, two unconventional female detectives who couldn’t care less about playing by the rules, in their cases and in their lives.
It's 1942 and Willowjean "Will" Parker is a scrappy circus runaway whose knife-throwing skills have just saved the life of New York's best, and most unorthodox, private investigator, Lillian Pentecost. When the dapper detective summons Will a few days later, she doesn't expect to be offered a life-changing proposition: Lillian's multiple sclerosis means she can't keep up with her old case load alone, so she wants to hire Will to be her right-hand woman. In return, Will will receive a salary, room and board, and training in Lillian's very particular art of investigation.
Three years later, Will and Lillian are on the Collins case: Abigail Collins was found bludgeoned to death with a crystal ball following a big, boozy Halloween party at her home--her body slumped in the same chair where her steel magnate husband shot himself the year before. With rumors flying that Abigail was bumped off by the vengeful spirit of her husband (who else could have gotten inside the locked room?), the family has tasked the detectives with finding answers where the police have failed. But that's easier said than done in a case that involves messages from the dead, a seductive spiritualist, and Becca Collins--the beautiful daughter of the deceased, who Will quickly starts falling for. When Will and Becca's relationship dances beyond the professional, Will finds herself in dangerous territory, and discovers she may have become the murderer's next target.
A wildly charming and fast-paced mystery written with all the panache of 1940s New York, Fortune Favors the Dead is a fresh homage to Holmes and Watson reads like the best of Dashiell Hammett and introduces an audacious detective duo for the ages.

My Review:

I picked this up this week because I was a bit unsatisfied with the Holmes collection over the weekend. I was still left with a taste for a bit of classic mystery with a twist – or two or ten – and for something a bit more Holmes-like than that collection.

Fortune Favors the Dead turned out to be everything I wanted, even if in the end it was nothing I expected. And that’s a great thing!

The story here is about a detective duo at the very beginning of their partnership, but Pentecost and Parker are nothing like Holmes and Watson, and not just because Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker are both female.

As the story, and the case, opens, Pentecost and Parker are on the opposing sides of the law, their lives, and their careers. Not that Will Parker could be said to have a career at this point in her life.

Will is a “cirky girl”, a circus performer who ran away from home and her abusive father and quite literally joined the circus. She’s only 20 as this story begins, and it is her story, told in her first-person voice with her own inimitable style.

But it’s told from a perspective several years past the events, and Will has grown up more than a bit, as well as acquired a polish of education, courtesy of the famous detective Ms. Lillian Pentecost. Whose life she saves in the opening act of the story by throwing a knife into Ms. Pentecost’s assailant. Once the dust settles and the police are finally satisfied that thorn-in-their-side Pentecost didn’t set up the entire altercation in order to have her “associate” off the bastard, Pentecost offers Parker a job as her assistant.

Not because, honestly, she wants an assistant, but because she needs one. Being a private investigator is a physically demanding and occasionally dangerous job. A job that Pentecost is still more than intellectually capable of but no longer physically up to. She has multiple sclerosis, and the disease is progressing.

Relatively slowly in her case. At the moment. But that could change. And her inevitable physical decline will only be accelerated if she continues on her present course. Hence the need for an assistant who can become her apprentice, perform the more physical aspects of their cases, and ultimately become the lead investigator.

This is the story of, not their first case, but their first seriously important case. A case that has so many twists and turns that it practically ties itself into a knot. Only for Will and Ms. Pentecost to discover that there has been someone hiding in the shadows, pulling all the strings, all along.

Since the very first night they met.

Escape Rating A+: I loved this, but I loved it because it oh-so-explicitly is NOT Holmes. Instead, Fortune Favors the Dead turned out to be a gender-bent, slightly twisted version of an entirely different classic detective pair.

Pentecost and Parker are updated female avatars for Nero Wolfe and his right-hand and both-legs man Archie Goodwin. And was it ever refreshing to read something that was both so completely different and yet so much a piece of something that I loved but hadn’t read in years.

While Wolfe and Goodwin were a pair of classic mystery detectives of the old school, they were also different in some of the same ways that Pentecost and Parker are different. At first blush, Wolfe is the genius and Goodwin is the sidekick, just as with Pentecost and Parker.

But, like Pentecost will be, Wolfe is physically restricted to his own New York Brownstone, even if Wolfe’s restrictions are entirely self-imposed. Goodwin does all the leg work for all of their cases and then brings the results to Wolfe. Goodwin is also a licensed private investigator in his own right, and he is the one who narrates their cases, very much in his own voice and in a noirish, hard-boiled style similar to Parker’s.

Goodwin makes mistakes, the same kind of mistakes that Parker does, and for some of the same reasons. But he’s no Watson and neither is Parker. They are partners in the investigations. Sometimes junior partners, but partners and not tagalongs. One of the differences between Holmes and Watson and either Wolfe and Goodwin or Pentecost and Parker is that while Watson was not the bumbler that the Basil Rathbone movies made him out to be, he wasn’t a detective, either. The better portrayals give Watson his own areas of expertise, but they are explicitly not the same areas as Holmes. With Parker, and Goodwin before her, the expertise is in the same area as their more famous, experienced and older partner. They operate in a different style, but in the same sphere.

No matter how much impostor syndrome Will Parker suffers from along the way.

As much as I loved Fortune Favors the Dead for its detectives’ resemblance to Wolfe and Goodwin, that’s not a reason to read this book – or, for that matter, to go back to the classic. I doubt that the Wolfe stories have worn well into the 21st century, but Pentecost and Parker certainly do.

That’s all to do with Will Parker’s voice. We’re in her head, reading her point-of-view, knowing what she knows – at least most of it – and becoming part of this world through her eyes. Parker is very much a detective of the hard-boiled school. She’d rather confront a suspect than patiently work through research – not that she isn’t good at both. But her penchant for action rather than contemplation gets her into trouble more than once in this story.

It’s also Parker’s voice that makes the circumstances palatable for 21st century readers. On the one hand, she’s forced to deal with all of the restrictions imposed on her gender and class, and on the other, she’s more than intelligent enough to be aware that they are stupid and work around them. In her head she mouths off to everyone, and that perspective brings her to life in a way that we can identify with.

At the same time, the case itself smacks of the “old school” of the classic era. It’s murder and suicide among the rich and upper crust, the servants are the first suspects and the men always think that they are the ones in charge.

But they never are.

In the end, the heart of the case is a lover’s triangle, blackmail, and follow the money, just not in ways that the classics of the detective era would ever have dealt with. And all of it is marvelous. Even the admittedly clichéd operator from the shadows who is set up to be a long-running nemesis.

Fortune Favors the Dead reads like the terrific opening act of a potential series. I sincerely hope so!

Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson WhiteheadThe Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, large print, audiobook
Pages: 306
Published by Doubleday Books on August 2nd 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned and, though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven - but the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. Even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

My Review:

As the saying goes, “fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” The Underground Railroad is definitely that kind of book. These specific events didn’t happen to this particular person, and yet, they all happened, all too frequently, to entirely too many people who had but one thing in common with Cora – the color of their skin.

The story in The Underground Railroad is historical fiction mixed with a bit of magical realism. The real, historical, Underground Railroad was not actually a railroad with rails and steam engines under the ground. The secret train with its hidden stations makes for a powerful metaphor for the vast network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape from the South’s “Peculiar Institution” to the theoretically “free” states of the North. Or to Canada.

Cora’s journey parallels many such real journeys, from the plantation in Georgia where she was born to her long and often desperate flight to freedom, endlessly pursued by the slave-catcher Ridgeway.

As she travels, she finds herself in different places, and in each she discovers a different way in which she, and her people, are not truly free of subjugation and hatred, even if it briefly appears so.

And while, again, the locations and the methods were not exactly in use in each specific place at that particular time, all these things really happened to real people just like Cora.

Her journey is one of continual loss, with the tantalizing hope of freedom always just out of reach, even when it seems most closely present. Her story is often grueling, and frequently heartbreaking. As each chance for hope and happiness is snatched away, we shake our heads and quake in anger, incensed that this is the way it was.

And this is the way, in so many ways, it still is. Slavery casts a long shadow, not just on those who suffered it directly, and those who perpetrated it and tried to perpetuate it, but on everything and everyone it touched. Even today.

Escape Rating B+: This is a hard story to read. We want to say, I want to say, that this treatment was beyond unjust, and that it couldn’t happen here. But we know from history that it most certainly did happen. And that its legacy is still with us.

The perspective in the story is that of Cora, a young woman born in slavery who decides to escape at whatever cost – because even though she knows that even the attempt is a death sentence if she fails – staying on the plantation is a sentence of immediate death in utter torment. There is no sugar-coating of the terrible conditions of slavery. Nor should there be.

But Cora is a difficult protagonist. Her story often feels as if it is being told at one remove. While we are outraged at everything that happens to her, we don’t always feel with her. She seems a bit detached, and so are we. There’s a part of me that believes that her detachment was part of her means of survival, but it makes her a sometimes cold character to follow.

Like the Railroad itself, each stage of her journey is a metaphor for one of the varying, but equally awful, ways that whites thought of blacks in the 19th century and believed that they were finding ways to deal with “the problem”. The most supposedly “enlightened” solutions contained some of the truest brutality, and the most overtly brutal enslaved everyone it touched, white as well as black, but in different ways. Even the “Free” North can’t bear the thought of a self-sufficient black community, as it gives the lie to all the stories they have told.

There are no easy answers in this book. The ending is not a happy redemption of anyone, more like a hope for a possible better future somewhere down the line. But we’re not there yet.

Sometimes a book sweeps all the awards, and one is left wondering why. The Underground Railroad is not one of those books. This is one that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.