Henrietta Thornton

If you’re hankering for bulla cake, coco fritters, gizadas, or other Caribbean foods, Miss Hortense has you covered, with recipes for those dishes and more provided throughout this introduction to the steely “pardner lady.” Readers can learn the ins and outs of the pardner while meeting Hortense’s frenemies and neighbors—who are mostly one and the same—in millennium London and flashbacks to the city in the 1960s, but the basic premise is that it’s the kind of money club often used by those who are unbanked. English banks won’t let Hortense and other members of her Black community have accounts, so the pardner sees them each contribute money every week, with members taking turns to get the whole pot. Over the years, the club has allowed its contributors to “become the person they wrote back home and boasted that they were.” But now all the funds have disappeared at the same time that there are several deaths in the community. Even the supposedly natural demises get Hortense thinking, but some of the deaths bear the hallmarks of attacks that happened years ago, when a man the community called the brute beat several women to death and left biblical messages with their bodies. Is he back? Hortense and the other pardner members will have to do their “Looking into Bones,” which is what they call their investigations. These have the habit of “creating more dots than perhaps connections,” but allow readers to explore a tangle of love, loathing, and buried secrets that leads to a delightful Christie-like ending in which fingers are pointed and confessions made. Zadie Smith fans should pick up this winner.