Description
'Spotswood understands that [...] spending time with unforgettable characters is paramount.' - New York Times
New York, 1946: The last time Will Parker let a case get personal, she walked away with a broken face, a bruised ego, and the solemn promise never again to let her heart get in the way of her job. But she called Hart and Halloway's Travelling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus's tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go.
To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all. The two swiftly find themselves lost in a funhouse of lies as Will begins to realize that her former circus compatriots aren't playing it straight, and that her murdered friend might have been hiding a lot of secrets beneath all that ink.
Dodging fistfights, firebombs, and flying lead, Will puts a lot more than her heart on the line in the search of the truth. Can she find it before someone stops her ticker for good?
Review
This is the second book in the Pentecost and Parker Mystery Series by Stephen Spotswood. The first book Fortune Favours the Dead I reviewed here.I enjoyed this book more than the first one. It is a standalone book, no need to have read the first book, but you will get a better feel for the two main detective characters of Pentecost and Parker.
In the first book we learnt that Parker had previously worked at the Travelling Circus before becoming a sidekick and detective with Pentecost. Now there's been a murder at the circus and after four years it's time to go back. The man who taught Parker all she knows about knife throwing is in jail accused of murdering another circus act who was also Parker's friend.
There was no doubt this time that we were in the 1940s. The language takes a few pages to get used to but once you do you are transported back in time. Parker is as quick witted as ever and has some very sassy and clever lines. While Pentecost is exercising her little grey cells and seeing clues no one even thought to look for.
This time the action takes place in Virginia and so everything is a little slower paced than New York City for the two detectives. Locals don't take kindly to the City gals and they have a hard time fitting in. Especially with the local police already having the culprit locked up in jail. But the circus owner thinks they have the wrong man and calls on ex-circus worker Parker to come and prove it.
Parker thinks she knows the circus folk and their lives after all she was one of them once. But maybe she's been away too long, or she never really knew them at all. One of the most poignant parts of the book for me was Parker realising that once you move away you may keep everything just like it was in your own mind, but when you go back nothing is the same at all.
I'm giving this book four out of five stars. My thanks to Headline Publishing Group for a copy of the book to review.
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