Tag:

20Th Century

Review

The Oxford Guide to Scandal and Lies

by Brian Kenney

A delightful take on espionage fiction, laced liberally with wit, mystery, romance, and a bit of Muriel Spark. It’s 1951, and England is busy putting itself back together, from physical infrastructure to its notorious class system. The setting is Oxford, where we are introduced to two students who couldn’t be more unalike: Honorable Ginevra Bishop (destined to wear red lipstick and earn top marks) and Sidney Braithwaite (from a mining family and now a war veteran who wants a successful career). The two are brilliant at ignoring each other, but M15 has its ways, and soon enough Gin and Sidney are working together to track down a poison victim and seek out a Soviet spy. Who could be next? While there is plenty of antipathy between the two, there’s also quite a bit of romantic tension, which rears itself from times to time. For fans of historical cozies and fun-yet-frightening spy capers.—Brian Kenney

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Review

The Spies of Hartlake Hall

by Danise Hoover

The year is 1917, and we begin in a seemingly mundane office of the Admiralty, where a seemingly mundane secretary finds a dead body in a locked room. She is, of course, an agent, as is her supervisor. In the dead man’s possession is a secret coded telegram that belongs in the admiral’s safe. Thus begins an incredibly tangled story of spies and deception with all the players invited to a country-house shooting party. Gallagher, boss of Mrs. Vane, our secretary, has engineered the weekend event at his stepfather’s house with the intent of smoking out the traitors and planting the right kind of misinformation in the correct ears. A greedy underhanded American, a misguided but loyal Armenian, terrible food, and cold drafty rooms liven things up.  Graham pays some homage to Agatha Christie in that members of the group keep dropping off, but there are plenty left to finish up the story. Those with poor name memory will do well to take notes, as this is as convoluted as it is entertaining.—Danise Hoover

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Review

Ruby Falls

by Dodie Ownes

Times are hard everywhere in 1928, but when Leo Lambert discovers a huge underground waterfall in a cave system outside Chattanooga, he is convinced it can be a moneymaker and names it after his wife, Ruby. There are curiosity seekers, but Ruby Falls needs something sensational to bring the crowds and their coins to town. Enter Professor Jeremiah Hagathorn, known all over the Midwest for his mind-reading skills, whom Leo challenges to find a hatpin hidden somewhere in the six miles of caves around Ruby Falls. With a small entourage in tow, including a newspaper reporter and Hagathorn’s wife, Editha, Hagathorn embarks on his mission. Unbeknownst to the group, Quinton, a cave guide, and Ada, a recent widower who has been secretly roaming the caves, have been charged with following the professor and others to ensure their safety. When the reporter is found dead after their first night in the caves, Hagathorn insists on continuing his quest before returning to the surface to report the murder, despite knowing that the killer is among them. No one is to be trusted, and as supplies dwindle, suspicions grow. Phillips gives readers two stories here—the sensational hatpin search amidst the danger and grandeur of Ruby Falls, and Ada’s grieving for a life never lived, not knowing about the one that lies before her. A historical mystery in a unique setting, adding “locked cave” to the genre vernacular.

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Review

The Italian Secret

by Danise Hoover

In a spectacular example of a post-war noir novel we have Billie Walker, a hardboiled PI following in her father’s tradition, with her specialty helping women out of terrible marriages by finding evidence of infidelity. The Sydney, Australia PI has a loyal and supportive staff, an attractive police officer to back her up, and a mystery in her background. In her father’s files, she finds an old picture, taken in an Italian town near Naples, of him, another woman, and a young girl. There follows the suspicious death of a client, a sea voyage with her mother to Naples, vendettas, the search for her father’s other family, and a deadly chase through the tunnels under the city. This is non-stop action, with an authenticity of mood, clothing, travel detail, and attitude that makes it special.

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Review

The Devil in Oxford

by Danise Hoover

Christmas in Oxford sounds like a good idea. But as might be predicted by anyone acquainted with Ruby and her housemate and employer, Mr. Owens, that is likely a false assumption. While antiquarian books are their business, the Oxford sojourn highlights Egyptian artifacts and brings Ruby back to the harsh memories of her WWI service as an ambulance driver. Her feelings for Ruan, healer and witch, must be confronted, as must her trust in old and dear friends, including Leona, her partner in ambulance duties. Circumstances require much late-night skulking involving lockpicks and a reluctant Ruan as a partner, as well as attendance (unwilling) at overblown parties.In the end, the heroes are found and the evildoers are truly evil, but as with many books in this series, reading is easier if one starts at volume one. Smuggling, murder, and cocaine are mixed within a roiling undercurrent of social and political tension in an atmosphere of scholarship. A nicely drawn period piece.

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Review

A Death on Corfu

by Brian Kenney

The island of Corfu at the turn of the 20th century, with its native Greek population, large British expat community, and tensions therein, provides an excellent background for crime fiction. When her husband died unexpectedly several years ago, Minnie Harper was left with two children to raise on a modest income, with a deathbed promise to her husband that the family would remain in Corfu. Well-educated Minnie isn’t in the position to turn down a side gig, so when she is asked by her neighbor Stephen Dorian—a well-known, and handsome, mystery author—to type the manuscript of his latest book, she can only say yes. Despite her loathing of the man. But just as the two seem to settle into a disagreeable routine, Minnie discovers that one of the island’s young Greek women, who works as a maid, has been murdered. And the British community is doing its very best to ignore the murder, if not actually suppress it, while the local Greeks, for different reasons, are keeping their lips sealed. But Minnie isn’t about to let justice go undone, and with the help of Stephen, she heads off where no British woman has gone before her. Fans of The Durrells in Corfu, a hugely popular Masterpiece Theater drama set in the ‘30s, will appreciate this prequel of sorts, as will fans of cozy historical mysteries by Rhys Bowen, Jacqueline Winspear, and Amanda Flower.

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Review

No. 10 Doyers Street

by Henrietta Thornton

The hero of Vatsal’s (Kitty Weeks series) latest absorbing historical fiction is Archana (Archie) Morley, a woman braving two new worlds: 1910 New York, where she came for a short visit but stayed after her parents died in Bombay (the novel uses the era’s language), and journalism, working for the Observer newspaper. This charming, gutsy character is barely tolerated by the boss and looked upon with suspicion by her coworkers—perhaps for wearing pants as much as for her race and gender. At home, things are better: Archie is married to the loving and supportive Dr. Phillip Morley, a health department official whose job and tony background give her access to wealth and power. But she’s interested in intriguing stories from every part of town, and won’t let go when Chinese gangsters are killed and the city imposes stern measures on Chinatown. They specifically target tiny, crooked Doyers Street, home of Mock Duck, the steely leader of the Hip Sing Tong gang, whose calm demeanor is belied by the list of gruesome crimes he’s been accused of. The racism endured by New York’s Chinese inhabitants is on stark display as Archie works to report the tangled goings on among Tammany Hall, the city’s Board of Improvement, and the gang underworld. Adding wonderful flavor is the rich detail from Vatsal’s deep research on New York City social and political history, and the gulf between the city’s “more susceptible classes” and its well-off citizens. For fans of Vatsal’s previous works and of historical fiction by Mariah Fredricks and Anna Lee Huber.

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Review

Secrets of Rose Briar Hall

by Henrietta Thornton

Millie Turner is the envy of 1908 New York. She nabbed the catch of her season, marrying devastatingly handsome financier Charles Turner. They’ve moved to Oyster Bay, Long Island, and live in a house Millie inherited, which is now decorated too ostentatiously for her liking—there’s a taxidermied zebra!—but what Charles wants, Charles gets. Millie is nervously but happily hosting a lavish party when suddenly everything changes—she wakes up to a freezing, dark house, with the party over and the guests gone. Nobody will tell her what ’s happened, but she slowly learns that after a crime was committed at the party, she took a weeks-long “rest cure”—a drug-induced sleep prescribed at her husband’s wishes. Millie has had a terrible upset, they say, and since hysteria “can lead to immoral behavior [and] make you ungovernable,” there’s no time to waste: she must enter an institution. Thus begins Millie’s fight for her life. The first-person narrative, told from the young woman’s point of view, is both shocking and exciting, moving from grand ballrooms to flophouses and from shady business dealings to the honesty of pure love. A lengthy court battle will keep readers deliciously on edge in James’s (The Woman in the Castello, 2023) shocking and gripping drama.

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Review

The Curse of Penryth Hall

by Henrietta Thornton

Devil-may-care heiress Ruby Vaughn has just sent the latest of her boss’s housekeepers running, with the woman on the way out muttering something about “a den of sin and vice.” Ruby does like to knock back a few drinks and scarcely cares about propriety, having planned, while a nurse during the Great War, to set up home with her fellow nurse and lover, Tamsyn. When that antiquarian-bookseller boss announces, “I’ve been thinking,” Ruby knows it doesn’t usually bode well, but this time there’s an upside. The trip he wants her to undertake, delivering mysterious books to a Ruan Kivell in Cornwall, brings her back in contact with Tamsyn, now Lady Chenoweth. Penryth Hall, Tamsyn’s miserable home with her abusive husband, only makes Ruby long all the more for the life she could have had with Tamsyn. When awful Lord Chenoweth is found dead, his body slashed as though by animals, the area’s depths of superstition and past misdeeds begin to reveal themselves, as do the powers of Ruan, the local Pellar, a powerful folk healer. Ruby refuses to believe in the curse that the locals say Chenoweth perished from, pursuing instead the help of the fledgling science of forensics to figure out what happened and restore Tamsyn’s happiness. This debut won the Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur First Crime Novel Competition, a well-deserved honor for a book whose gutsy main character and immersive world-building will remind readers of Margaret Dove in Evie Hawtrey’s And By Fire.

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