m ys t e r y
whose mother, tavern singer Mary Alice Bentine, told him that he was the natural son of Mortimer Gromley, who retired after making a pile in linen sales. Gromley indignantly denies the charge, and his wife, Cora, turns out to be an unexpectedly supportive witness. So Scorbion, assisted by his old friend Calvin Brown and the other employees of Brown’s barbershop, must question everyone involved and determine who’s telling the truth and who’s not. The second case revolves around the Hopkins Traveling Circus, whose employees come under suspicion in the death of Victor Hutchfield, the woodworker who’d crafted a king-sized pair of stilts for pint-sized Freddy Rumple, an aspiring stilt walker who’d commissioned the extra-long stilts in the hope of setting himself apart from all the other stilt walkers in England. The third and most elaborate case begins with the disappearance of farmer George Barlan’s hog and proceeds to the slaughter of Barlan himself. Throughout it all, Scorbion, an obvious parody of Hercule Poirot, comes across as a comically obsessive dandy who interrogates his way thoroughly and methodically through a series of mysteries as lacking in inspiration as he is in brilliance. Bleiweiss seems to have mastered every convention of golden age detective stories except the ones that made them great. Routine puzzles solved by a detective who can’t hold a candle to Hercule Poirot. Quel dommage!
SHADY HOLLOW
Black, Juneau Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (240 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jan. 25, 2022 978-0-593-31571-2 Under the fig-leaf Black pseudonym, newcomers Jocelyn Cole and Sharon Nagel introduce an animals-only village in which members of many species coexist, except when they’re killing each other. Nobody much liked Otto Sumpf, but nobody can imagine who disliked the toad enough to stab him in the back and dump him into a pond. The mystery deepens when Solomon Broadhead, the adder who serves as Shady Hollow’s medical examiner, announces that Otto has been poisoned as well, presumably by something introduced into the bottle of plum wine foxy reporter Vera Vixen found near his body. Tracing the bottle to its likely source, the Bamboo Patch vegetarian restaurant, she learns from owner Sun Li, a giant panda with a medical background, that the likely agent was heartstill, a little of which goes a long way. Of the two bears in the local police, Chief Theodore Meade is as usual out past his depth, and the paw prints at the crime scene have led Deputy Orville Braun to arrest crooked raccoon Lefty, who’s obviously innocent of this particular crime. The killer meanwhile moves on to bigger game, wealthy sawmill owner Reginald von Beaverpelt, who survives one murder attempt thanks to Sun Li but not a second, leaving Shady Hollow on shaky financial ground. Although it’s clear that Reginald has been carrying on with rest-home aide Ruby Ewing, the authors mercifully avoid any lurid details of beaver-sheep sex. Instead, intrepid Vera, the most charming figure here, dutifully checks alibis and interviews suspects who draw more clearly on human than animal stereotypes. A series debut that retains many of the conventions of a village cozy, just more broadly drawn, like a greeting card.
SPIRITS AND SOURDOUGH
Cates, Bailey Berkley (288 pp.) $8.99 paper | Jan. 4, 2022 978-0-593099-24-7
A hedge witch and her accomplished cohort investigate a murder and more. Now that Katie Lightfoot’s solved the mystery that threatened her wedding to Declan McCarthy in Witches and Wedding Cake (2020), she’s enjoying married life and working with her aunt and uncle at the Honeybee Bakery, where everything she bakes gets a little something extra to enhance the experience. Katie, who’s not from Savannah originally, looks forward to a ghost tour, complete with tales of the exceedingly haunted city. Tour guide Teddy LaRue, who has the ability to see ghosts, announces that a woman’s just been murdered and is asking Katie to find her killer. When Teddy describes the victim, Katie realizes it’s probably Leigh Markes, an art gallery owner who was recently in the bakery with her book club when a nasty verbal fight broke out. Katie reports the crime to a detective she’s worked with before. Of course, he doesn’t believe her until the body is found, sweeping Katie up once again in the search for a killer. The job steals precious time from her own personal goal: finding Declan’s guardian spirit, Connell, who’s wandering lost in the ether. Leigh had a complicated life and a number of enemies, and Katie and her friends must use all their powers to identify the murderer and recover Connell. Even readers who shun paranormal activities can enjoy this mystery, larded with charmingly quirky characters.
PIGNON SCORBION & THE BARBERSHOP DETECTIVES
Bleiweiss, Rick Blackstone Publishing (300 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 8, 2022 978-1-66504-675-6
Bleiweiss’ first novel is actually a cycle of stories starring a new police inspector who comes to the town of Haxford in 1910 and quickly impresses the locals. The first case for the eponymous sleuth is that of William Bentine, an even more recent arrival 126
|
15 november 2021
|
fiction
|
kirkus.com
|
