THEIR FOUR HEARTS, intense, appalling, urgent, amazing

THEIR FOUR HEARTS
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (illus. Gregory Klassen; tr. Max Lawton)
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: ?5*? but on what scale....

The Publisher Says: In many respects, Their Four Hearts is a book of endings and final things. Vladimir Sorokin wrote it in the year the Soviet Union collapsed and then didn't write fiction for ten years after completing it—his next book being the infamous Blue Lard (q.v.), which he wrote in 1998. Without exaggerating too much, one might call it the last book of the Russian twentieth century and Blue Lard the first book of the Russian twenty-first century. It is a novel about the failure of the Soviet Union, about its metaphysical designs, and about the violence it produced, but presented as God might see it or Bataille might write it.

Their Four Hearts follows the violent and nonsensical missions carried out by a group of four characters who represent Socialist Realist archetypes: Seryozha, a naive and optimistic young boy; Olga, a dedicated female athlete; Shtaube, a wise old man; and Rebrov, a factory worker and a Stakhanovite embodying Soviet manhood. However, the degradation inflicted upon them is hardly a Socialist Realist trope. Are the acts of violence they carry out a more realistic vision of what the Soviet Union forced its "heroes" to live out? A corporealization and desacralization of self-sacrificing acts of Soviet heroism? How the Soviet Union truly looked if you were to strip away the ideological infrastructure? As we see in the long monologues Shtaube performs for his companions—some of which are scatological nonsense and some of which are accurate reproductions of Soviet language—Sorokin is interested in burrowing down to the libidinal impulses that fuel a totalitarian system and forcing the reader to take part in them in a way that isn't entirely devoid of aesthetic pleasure.

As presented alongside Greg Klassen's brilliant charcoal illustrations, which have been compared to the work of Bruno Schulz by Alexander Genis and the work of Ralph Steadman as filtered through Francis Bacon by several gallerists, this angular work of fiction becomes a scatological storybook-world that the reader is dared to immerse themselves in.

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My Review: Before I begin, let me say:
→H↔E↔E↔D↔T↔H↔E↔C↔O↔N↔T↔E↔N↔T↔W↔A↔R↔N↔I↔N↔G←

If you need a content warning for gore, body horror, transgressive...anything...horseman, pass by. This is Sorokin, of Blue Lard fame, playing Literature's organ with the unsettling pedal fully depressed and the weird stop pulled all the way out. Comme d'habitude, then.

So, the audience now being self-winnowed, I'm going to tell you as little as I can about the transgressions and more about why I care enough to suggest you read this tooth-ripped bloody gobbet shoved in a sweaty gym sock of a book. Because you still can, that's why. This is a litmus test for collapse. If you read it and are not repulsed fairly often, you're probably on the barricades now. If you read this and think, "oh my gawd how'd he geta away with THAT?!" twice a chapter, you're marching somewhere, and shitposting about the 2025ness of it all, and postcarding the hell out of red districts. Everyone else, the "this is repulsive!" to the "this should be banned!" folk, why are you even here? It is not safe for you to be reading anything here when you're under curfew. Off to The New York Times, now, quick as you like, no hands outside the windows!

Like Blue Lard, like Moderan, like everything Burroughs or Dennis Cooper ever wrote, this weird, janky, slightly collapsing edifice of artifice requires you to participate. Very few things in the content-consuming 2025 we live in *require* you to participate to make them work. Sorokin's works aren't simple, even simplistic, slickly made entertainments, they are viscera of story hoicked out of places you didn't think there was spare narrative flesh. There wasn't spare narrative flesh. Vital organs of awareness and complicity and oblivious cruelty are wrenched out and held up before your dumbfounded gaze...and the chapter-opening art adds to that impact.

Sound unappealing? It's not here to appeal to you, it's here to make you reach inside yourself and find the pieces...they're only going to be pieces, I don't think inchoate monstruous sadists read my blog...of these characters in crises they did not make, or try to make better in any way. It is in all of us to look away, to accept pretty surfaces on ugly things, ugly selves. That response is not possible while reading Their Four Hearts.

And that's the point of reading it. I think it could do you a power of good between retches.

THE GIRL IN THE GREEN DRESS, well-fictionalized historical murder case

THE GIRL IN THE GREEN DRESS
MARIAH FREDERICKS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of The Lindbergh Nanny comes an evocative mystery about the 1920 murder of the gambler Joseph Elwell, featuring New Yorker writer Morris Markey and Zelda Fitzgerald.

At the dawn of the Jazz Age, Morris Markey arrives in New York to become a writer. Having served in France, he needs to be in a place so distracting he cannot hear himself think. New in town, Markey hovers at the edge of the city’s revels, unable to hear the secrets that might give him his first Big Story. Finally one night he spots Joseph Elwell, a man about town known for courting wealthy married women, with a glorious girl in a dress of silver and dollar green.

The next morning, Elwell’s housekeeper runs out into the street screaming that Elwell has been shot. Every door and window in the house is locked. Did the ravishing woman kill her paramour? At last, Morris Markey has his story.

To penetrate the glittering world of Joseph Elwell, Markey turns to the newly famous Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who met Elwell the same fateful night he night. Bored while Scott is working on his next novel, Zelda offers to help Markey with his investigation.

Together, Markey and Zelda learn that there were many people in Elwell's life who had reason to want him dead. And when a second man is found shot in his home in a very similar way, Markey begins to suspect that the truth may be more complicated—a story so dangerous that after he finishes it three decades later, he himself is found dead in his home, a single bullet through his head.

Mariah Fredericks's third standalone novel based on a true story from New York City's glamorous past, The Girl in the Green Dress is a truly standout historical mystery.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The past is an inexhaustible goldmine for novelists. Author Fredericks works it with skill, and a very discerning eye...there's enough fact to get a really good story here, but not enough to make a microhistory true-crime book of. That's a storyteller at work, discerning the bones of an involving story!

The story told is pretty emblematic of prosperity's victims. Young, ambitious, seeing around them all the world through the envious lens of desire, of greed for more; and yet, innocent youth does not see the cost of it despite their focus on a failure of existing social rules. We're all blinkered by something we do not examine in youth, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the poster girl for it. She lived a life of glamour and sophistication in the 1920s that utterly beguiled many...especially Morris Markham, newly arrived reporter seeking the case that could make his name in Jazz Age New York.

I was very aware of the 2000s "manic pixie dream girl" vibes coming from Zelda in a way I had not seen before. There's a sadness and frailty in Zelda's real life story, but this use of her troubled mind bothered me...Markey used Zelda for her connections, fell for the of her image that he created (like so many others in her life), and she was so bored she hopped on his ambition to bag the story to amuse herself. It felt uneasily like a transactional acquaintance. Hence the missing half-star.

As that was not unusual for the times, those or ours, I merely note the fact in case it bothers others as well. It feels like the sort of thing Zelda would've been deeply familiar with, being an intelligent woman in a society that does not much value those beings.

So Markey, with Zelda's help getting into the Right Sort's parties and homes, sets about learning all he can about the murdered man. We're along with him, in third person close PoV, so it does feel like a real-time unfolding of the absurd and artificial world of the moneyed elite in crisis. Asking questions and listening in, discussing the murder victim's many shenanigans, all of it happens as we see the people in that world enacting some very peculiar social rituals around drinking, drugging, and sexing each other up. The Great War recently past damaged those off the battlefield, differently to be sure, as those on it. These times were in flux as institutions rattled and broke; the idols were changing; and Zelda was shoving statues off pedestals to the admiring eyes of Markey in the crowd around her.

As expected after her fictionalization of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Author Fredericks is scrupulous in pointing out her inventions, embroiderings, and naming her sources for the story. It is a big part of the reason I trust her to tell me a tale...she tells me when she's departing from the facts. The biggest departure was the central sleuthing duo...they never met in real life! I suppose that's a spoiler. oh well, so be it, you're reading a review so it can't be too surprising. I was completely convinced by their world as drawn here, so just accepted it was all real for the duration. Great work!

As this story centers on an unsolved murder, bookended by a very suspicious death, the very nature of it is to be uncertain...however, it does not feel unfinished as a story. No one who has lived a long enough life really believes in neatly tied-up ends, that's often why people read series-character mystery novels. I don't think that reader will necessarily be thrilled by the looseness of the ending as it is not a tidy resolution on that level.

It very much is a good story, for all that, and a terrific way to wile away a day.

HASSOUNA MOSBAHI'S PAGE: WE NEVER SWIM IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE, both a truism and an Eternal Verity; and SOLITAIRE: A Novel, a title very fitting

WE NEVER SWIM IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE
HASSOUNA MOSBAHI (tr. William Maynard Hutchins)
Syracuse University Press
$32.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Originally published in 2020, Hassouna Mosbahi’s riveting novel explores the human psyche amidst the turbulent aftermath of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Through the experiences of three friends, Mosbahi narrates the profound impact of violence and cultural change in Tunisian society and the ways in which those shifts are reflected in their personal lives.

We meet Saleem, on the brink of turning fifty, whose once blissful marriage teeters on the edge as his mental health deteriorates. Aziz, a retired postal clerk with an unassuming appearance, finds solace in literature and international cinema. And Omran, a well-traveled writer and public intellectual, navigates a complex relationship with a young Franco-Tunisian woman who lives in Paris. As these men forge an unlikely friendship over drinks at a coastal bar in Bizerte, and through long walks along the beach, they grapple with the increasing political extremism that surrounds them. Repelled by the Jihadist rhetoric and the brand of masculinity it represents, the three friends question their relationship to their country, which is both their home and a place they feel alienated from.

We Never Swim in the Same River Twice offers an alternative narrative of the Arab Spring, one that challenges Western media’s depiction of a “blessed revolution,” and gives readers an intimate and elegiac portrait of Tunisian history.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: William Maynard Hutchins, who translated this story, is soeone whose work I admire and seek out. He came to my attention thirty-plus years ago when I first read, and loved, Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. In the hands of a less skiled translator that somewhat sudsy family saga could've become cloyingly moralistic...a fate that befell the later translation of Midaq Alley in my opinion.

I've been at a loss; this book did not irresistibly draw me in, but it's much better than most books I read. It's not to my taste. Its message very much is. Then I read World Literature Today's review of it, by M.D. Allen, of whom I've never heard before: (link: https://worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/july/we-never-swim-same-river-twice-hassouna-mosbahi)

...{visiting} a newly independent Algeria makes {the author's stand-in} consider that the Islamist establishment there also now misrepresents the protracted and bloody war that has just ended as having been fought not against colonial rule but in favor of “fatwas advocating violence, [and] a culture of hatred and loathing.”

Mosbahi’s high reputation as a novelist will not be hurt by this very readable work, which gives a vivid if not especially pleasant picture of post–Arab Spring Tunisia; nor will anyone but the most intransigent of his political opponents deny his moral courage.

This is a message I can not help but support, said however, aimed wherever, in whichever language of culture. Moral courage IN PUBLIC is more important now than it has ever been in my lifetime, though I stipulate that it is not and has never been unimportant.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SOLITAIRE: A Novel
HASSOUNA MOSBAHI
Syracuse University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In Hassouna Mosbahi’s engrossing and keenly observed novel, he takes readers deep into one day in the life of Yunus, a Tunisian intellectual.

A professor of French language and Flaubert specialist, Yunus is recently retired and separated from his wife, as he leaves the city to settle in the Tunisian coastal city of Nabeul.

Searching for solitude, he hopes to spend the remainder of his life among the books he loves.

On the day of his sixtieth birthday, Yunus plunges into a delayed midlife crisis as he reflects on the major moments in his life, from taking up writing as a young man to his career as a university professor to his failed marriage.

Yunus’s identity crisis mirrors that of his Tunisian homeland with its tumultuous history of political and cultural upheaval.

He meditates on the lives of his friends, drawing from his memory a colorful cast of characters whose experiences reflect the outsized influence of religion and tradition in their lives.

Through the eyes of Yunus, Mosbahi’s elegiac, literary novel explores life and death, love and writing, and the relationship between puritanism and extremism in the Arab world today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Quiet ruminations of a man younger than me that I'd've hated at forty, been scared by at fifty, and...uncomfortably...relate to at *mumble*ty-five.

I seemed to be a dead man granted a chance to observe the joy of life from the darkness of the tomb. The glass escaped from my hand, and shards of its glass flew across the kitchen floor. I did not hear the laughter overflowing with love that a smashing glass had inspired in a poet—it may have been Apollinaire, Eluard, or someone else. What I heard was my spirit splintering like the dry bough of a green tree. I left the kitchen and went to the bedroom to curl up in bed. I closed my eyes, wishing to flee from my black soul to another world. At some moment, a different vision of my country dawned on me—not the vague, gloomy one I had grown accustomed to harboring as an expatriate. It came to me with the radiant light of a Mediterranean morning on the beach at Les Grottes in Bizerte, green and fragrant like the vineyards and the orchards of figs and almonds in the spring at Raf Raf, dreamy like sunset in the oases of el-Djerid, and white and blue like the houses in Sidi Bou Said. I leapt out of bed happily, like someone who had long misplaced something and found it again after despairing that he ever would find it. So, I returned to my fatherland.

It's nice, and it's resonant...I felt the same way returning to New York after exile in Texas...but y'all, do not overlook that "fatherland" ending this passage. This is not a western country but a westernized one, and it really shows. There are assumptions inside this narrative invisible to a Tunisian man of a certain age, women exist in relation to me being the most toxic one.

It's not unusual, honestly, in literature from anywhere to see men taking women for granted. It bothers me more now than ever because the world is at the intersection of multiple crises and can not remotely afford to turn away minds and hands needed to figure out then apply solutions to the problems we face.

A shame it's not so stone-cold simple, and obvious, to the old white men desperately clinging to power.

As I was saying...Author Mosbahi has some assumptions that jangle warning bells in my 21st-century-woke mind. The narrator, still less the author, demonstrate the remotest awareness of their cultural blinders, which the best, the most successful critically anyway, US writers are at long last coming to do. We've all got miles to go before we sleep.

SLANTING TOWARDS THE SEA, saddens me how much trouble is self-inflicted

SLANTING TOWARDS THE SEA
LILILA HILJE
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spanning twenty years and one life-altering summer in Croatia, Slanting Towards the Sea is at once an unforgettable love story and a powerful exploration of what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself.

Ivona divorced the love of her life, Vlaho, a decade ago. They met as students at the turn of the millennium, when newly democratic Croatia was alive with hope and promise. But the challenges of living in a burgeoning country extinguished Ivona’s dreams one after another—and a devastating secret forced her to set him free.

Now Vlaho is remarried and a proud father of two, while Ivona’s life has taken a downward turn. In her thirties, she has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father. Bewildered by life’s disappointments, she finds solace in reconnecting with Vlaho and is welcomed into his family by his spirited wife, Marina. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the carefully cultivated dynamic between the three is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved.

Set against the mesmerizing Croatian coastline, Slanting Towards the Sea is a cinematic, emotionally searing debut about the fragile nature of potential and the transcendence of love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Writing in her second language has not hindered Author Hilje's ability to craft a story well worth reading. I venture to guess self-sabotage is the leading cause of unhappiness and relationship collapse in the entire world.

The romantic myth is that love, true love, is a wonderful and generative force for good in our personal lives and the world at large.

Baloney.

Ivona truly loves Vlaho, and does an unselfish thing that makes his life better for him. It makes her spiral deeper into her existing sadness. I'm convinced that, had she talked it out with her husband, a lot of their troubles would've gone away, a lot of pain and suffering would've been deferred, and a lot of heartache could've been sidestepped.

But not one single thing would've changed, because nothing about love could've taught Ivona what the real, basic, unseen problem was. Ivona, and the rest of us mere mortals, must always be blind in order to see our way forward into the life we say we want. "It wasn't until years later that I saw her words for what they really meant. If people want to love you, they do, no matter how flawed you are. But if they aren't inclined to love you, nothing you say or do, no amount of your own goodness, can make them change their mind." Vlaho's life-partner, since he can't have his love, is perforce a practical soul....

It's a tragedy to get what you want, says the old maxim, and it is very true. Then you're required to look deeper for the sources of your unhappiness...Ivona sees hers (with a vicious assist from Vlaho's fully evil mother), but not Vlaho's, as she lets him go; Vlaho sees Ivona's only through the scrim of his own needs and wants. It's hard to be in a relationship that founders. Ivona does the self-defeating thing of clinging to the edges of Vlaho's life, while dedicating herself to her truly toxic parent's care. She is always on hold in this life because she has that core of sadness in her that can't be jollied away. It's central to her sense of herself.

Vlaho finally confronts his core of need when Ivona, after many years spent orbiting him, his wife, their kid (who is Ivona's god-daughter, if that ain't a red flag for emotional crisis what is?) falls for Asier. He's a Spaniard, he's nothing to or about Croatia, he is a blank slate to Ivona...free at last, free at last, I hear Dr. King echoing in my mind. Only, this is change, this is a way for Ivona to be herself and not defined in her orbit around Vlaho! Can he stand it?

Croatia...Dalmatia of old...is barely two decades old as a political polity. Its different parts are united by cultural ties older than any of the countries around it. This backdrop is another character in the novel, in the sense that it imbues and informs the entirety of the story..."Back home, all things slant towards the sea" is a genius sentence, spoken very early on, in that it conveys more and more meanings as the story progresses. Everything is pointing to the sea, the source, the unstoppable unknowable force that rules our planet and our lives. The sea as a metaphor, the sea as a simile, the sea as a simple fact, all come into play.

It is the slanting to the sea that none of us resist, we are simply not able to go gently. I hope the read does for your sensibilities what it did for mine...sharpened and focused the search for happiness.

RETURN TO LATVIA, it's happening again and you're not paying attention

RETURN TO LATVIA
MARINA JARRE (tr. Ann Goldstein)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: ?

The Publisher Says: Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia—a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay—she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto and the forest south of Riga where tens of thousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood.

Piecing together documents and memories, Return to Latvia explores immense guilt, repression and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps in plain view.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're Jewish and support this administration, you should realize how extremely delusional you are after you read this book. It does not start with Jews, not this time, but it won't stop before it gets to you.

Don't beleve me? Neither did the Jews who smiled smugly as "gypsys" and fegelehs and communists went to the camps.

Hate can not be satisfied. Hate cannot be appeased. Hate cannot be directed.

Stand up to it or be consumed by it.

There is no healing from hate. It deforms and disfigures and eats its fuel as certainly as their targets. It's the same bitter irony: To combat the thing, you must adopt the thing. Controlling evil, paradoxically, requires doing evil, thus scaring the haters into silence.

The lesson of history is the bitter, horrifying truth: Nothing can ever stop hatred. Scare haters into silence, and never, ever stop suspecting the grim, ugly truth is they're still there. Make it too expensive to their own lives to enact hatred like we are seeing roar back to life in the world today. The camps are real. The "news" is reporting on them and y'all aren't out in the streets...those who can be physically...calling attention to them. That is called "complicity".

Future Marina Jarres will write this story again, and again, and again, unless y'all pull your thumbs out and start doing the hard, icky work of combating hatred with hatred. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. But if you can read this story and not see how hugely much it costs not to do it...

...

...I've answered my own question. Signed, one your inaction has doomed to the camps unless I get lucky and die first.

THE MARIGOLD COTTAGES MURDER COLLECTIVE...nope

THE MARIGOLD COTTAGES MURDER COLLECTIVE
JO NICHOLS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The perfect summer read, full of charm and heart, written in the vein of The Thursday Murder Club or Only Murders in the Building but with a southern California twist.

Mrs. B, the landlady of The Marigold Cottages is a stubborn idealist who only rents to people she cares about: Sophie, an anxious young playwright with a dark past; Hamilton, an agoraphobe who likes to overshare; Ocean, a queer sculptor raising two kids alone; the perfectionist Lily-Ann; and Nicholas, a finance bro who’s hiding secrets.

The tenants live contentedly in their doll-house bungalows in Santa Barbara, just minutes from the beach, until their peace is shattered when Anthony, a quiet, hulking, but potentially violent ex-con moves in. Three weeks later, a dead body is discovered on the streets of the peaceful neighborhood. Anthony is arrested, and the tenants heave sighs of relief. Until Mrs. B, convinced that he's innocent, marches down to the police station and confesses to the crime herself. The tenants band together and form “The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective” to save their beloved landlady. As clues are unearthed and secrets are revealed, the community of misfits only grows more tight-knit...until a second body is found. Full of eccentricity, humor, community, The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective will keep you hooked until the last page.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mrs. B might care about these people; I didn't. (Didn't care about her, either; kept thinking Mrs. Madrigal had had ECT.)

Ocean was tolerable; Sophie was not; Anthony...what was that about? Like asking a casting director to write you a TV pilot or giving the cinematographer control over the budget, this felt like what happens when there are people deciding things outside their skill set. Much like finance-bro Nicholas, who was hiding secrets I don't remember because I didn't care before or after I knew them.

I give it stars for being seriously lacking in the usual copaganda vibes in cozy mysteries. The police aren't bumbling boobs or mustachio-twirling villains; they're creepy because they are the hulls left after Conformity and Capitalism bash idealism into sludgy slop. They're not solving the real crimes but enforcing Order.

Refreshingly, even bracingly, honest.

PoVs come and go, which will become a trope if this turns into a series. I've already said I didn't like the characters so it wasn't like the tonal shifts took me out of the one character I didn't like's PoV but rather bounced me from insufferable Artiste to dull mom to cipher. I suspect others will feel differently. I see star ratings I simply can't imagine the basis for all over Netgalley and Goodreads.

Like those Osman and Backman and Robinson books, once was enough. Y'all keep lappin' it up; I'll be trawling for something that's not this in the bookstores.

MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY (Mrs. Christie #1), new cozy-mystery series with literary ghost-sleuth

MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY (Mrs. Christie #1)
AMANDA CHAPMAN
Berkley Books /Berkley Prime Crime (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Book conservator Tory Van Dyne and a woman claiming to be Agatha Christie on holiday from the Great Beyond join forces to catch a killer in this spirited mystery from Amanda Chapman.

Tory Van Dyne is the most down-to-earth member of a decidedly eccentric old-money New York family. For one thing, as book conservator at Manhattan’s Mystery Guild Library, she actually has a job. Plus, she’s left up-town society behind for a quiet life downtown. So she’s not thrilled when she discovers a woman in the library’s Christie Room who calmly introduces herself as Agatha Christie, politely requests a cocktail and announces she’s there to help solve a murder—that has not yet happened.

But as soon as Tory determines that this is just a fairly nutty Christie fangirl, her socialite/actress cousin Nicola gets caught up in the suspicious death of her less-than-lovable talent agent. Nic, as always, looks to Tory for help. Tory, in turn, looks to Mrs. Christie. The woman, whoever or whatever she is, clearly knows her stuff when it comes to crime.

Aided by a found family of unlikely sleuths—including a snarky librarian, an eleven-year-old computer whiz, and an NYPD detective with terrible taste in suits—Tory and the woman claiming to be her very much deceased literary idol begin to unravel the twists and turns of a murderer’s devious mind. Because, in the immortal words of Miss Jane Marple, “murder is never simple.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Need a puzzle to solve to see summer out? Something with just enough unreality to feel low-stakes and just enough emotional reality to make investing in it worth your time?

Berkley Books' Prime Crime imprint gotcha covered with Amanda Chapman's first offering.

I expected to be politely dismissive of this first in a proposed series by Amy Pershing's alter ego. I haven't read her other cozy series. I don't think I will because there's cozy, then there's so cozy you can't breathe, like an oppressively crowded Victorian living room. That's Cape Cod to me, where her other series is set.

I'll take Manhattan.

It's fun to find the call-outs to Christie's works scattered around, and it's fun...to my surprise...to have Dame Agatha just appear out of nowhere to work with Tory on solving what they know is a murder but are having trouble convincing others has that feel to it. For that matter how Tory becomes convinced that Dame Agatha is who she says she is gets handled the same way: tough and disbelieving attitude at first, then it just is part of reality in the story. In my own experience that's exactly how the unthinkable, the unbelievable, gets trojan-horsed into becoming the way things are. It's very much helped along in this narrative by the fact that Dame Agatha is only seen inside the library setting, not out wandering the Village.

It did not escape my notice that the first-person narrator, Tory, has the unbelievably cush life she has because she's a nepo baby. It's not really made much of, just presented as fact. There's no real pushback, but the situation isn't set up to draw attention to itself...Tory's a woman with a life and a style not available without lucky draws in the birth lottery.

That's all so very cozy as a backdrop. It is meant to offer the reader maximum comfort as rents in the fabric of society get repaired and ma'at is restored as it must be in a series mystery. A concern I felt going in was that the Christie-facing bits would really *require* the reader to know already what that particular story referred to was about, or the reference would fall flat; not at all the case. I found the varying levels of familiarity with Dame Agatha's works never impacted my understanding of the plot in any negative way. It offered a frisson of fun when I got it, but nothing was lost when /i didn't see the story connection for myself because that was dealt with in dialogue.

Tory, as the main character and the first-person narrator, will of necessity need to appeal to you for the read to work.

Later, when I'd had a chance to process our little encounter, I realized it made a kind of weird sense that if my guest was indeed Agatha Christie (which I did not believe for a minute), and if she had indeed decided to visit New York City some fifty years after she'd been airlifted to the Great Beyond (which I also did not believe for a minute), she might indeed choose New York's Mystery Guild Library as a home base.

Not quite the first words in the book, but darn close. This is what you're getting, so if you don't like it already, then horseman, pass by.

Me, I'm all in. And the next one, too. Fair enough play, a fun narrative voice, a premise silly enough to make me smile but never played for laughs at anyone...if only I'd liked the love interest I'd be raving!