{"id":4067,"date":"2025-01-02T19:05:48","date_gmt":"2025-01-02T19:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=4067"},"modified":"2025-01-23T16:26:00","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T16:26:00","slug":"a-murder-for-miss-hortense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=4067","title":{"rendered":"A Murder for Miss Hortense"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019re 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 \u201cpardner lady.\u201d Readers can learn the ins and outs of the pardner while meeting Hortense\u2019s frenemies and neighbors\u2014who are mostly one and the same\u2014in millennium London and flashbacks to the city in the 1960s, but the basic premise is that it\u2019s the kind of money club often used by those who are unbanked. English banks won\u2019t 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 \u201cbecome the person they wrote back home and boasted that they were.\u201d 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 \u201cLooking into Bones,\u201d which is what they call their investigations. These have the habit of \u201ccreating more dots than perhaps connections,\u201d 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.<strong> Zadie Smith fans should pick up this winner.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019re 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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4066,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[104,76,180,55,56],"class_list":["post-4067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-african-american-black","tag-cozy","tag-debut","tag-mystery-detective","tag-women-sleuths"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Hortense-400x400.jpeg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Hortense-400x600.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}