A gravely decorous period piece that vividly evokes its moment while maintaining an archly amused distance from it.
Murder strikes much too close to home for sleuthing socialite Zofia Turbotyńska.
Called to the beach below the Rożnowski Villa one April morning in 1895, Cracow police commissioner Stanislaw Jednoróg finds the body of a young woman who’s been stabbed to death. The victim is Karolina Szulc, Zofia’s virginal 17-year-old housemaid, who abruptly quit the day before to leave town in the company of the man who’d swept her off her feet even though she already had another suitor. Angry and sad, Zofia presses her cook, Franciszka Gawęda, to dig up evidence of the new sweetheart’s name, and Franciszka obliges by finding a business card that identifies him as engineer Marceli Bzowski. When Zofia, already shaken by the suicide of Brazilian José Silva the morning after Karolina’s death, confronts Bzowski in the full fury of her righteousness, the engineer, who’s married, swears that he wasn’t the man in question; an entire case of his business cards must have been stolen during his last trip to the Rózana Street brothel run by Madame Olesia Dunin. Following this clue leads Zofia to focus her investigation on a trafficking ring whose boundaries far exceed Rózana Street, Cracow, and Poland. Pseudonymous partners Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński bring both the do-gooders and the criminals of fin-de-siècle Cracow to entertaining life, but their deepest interest is in the unlikely detective lurking beneath “the sedate Mrs. Jekyll”: “the hidden Mrs. Hyde, the fearless stalker of criminals.”
A gravely decorous period piece that vividly evokes its moment while maintaining an archly amused distance from it.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-15757-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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