Two of this month’s mysteries involve writers trying to solve a crime. One has all the tools and skills of the contemporary true-crime writer; the other is a complete amateur, making it up as she goes along in 1911, with only her novelist’s acuity and imagination to guide her. But her name, Edith Wharton, opens doors that would be closed to any other amateur sleuth. Both women are at an inflection point in their lives; for Edith, the case is a distraction from her stagnant marriage, and for Amanda Bailey, who has no personal life, it’s a consuming professional imperative.
Amanda’s creator, English writer Janice Hallett, is one of our most innovative mystery writers. In The Appeal and The Twyford Code, she dispensed with conventional narrative prose, using e-mails, text messages, voice memos, and so on to engage more directly with the reader. It’s a tricky technique that leaves the reader to fill in the blanks that a narrator would typically provide, and with numerous characters pursuing various agendas, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels is Hallett’s twistiest, most penetrating novel yet.
Amanda has been commissioned to write a “holiday page-turner for connoisseurs” about the notorious 2003 Alperton Angels case, in which a baby was nearly killed in what appeared to be a cult ritual. The baby was rescued, but three of the cult members, the so-called Angels, supposedly committed suicide, and a young man loosely connected to the crime was murdered. The cult leader was imprisoned for life, and the teenage “Angels” presumed to be the baby’s parents evaporated into anonymity. Amanda’s charge is to find the baby, who is about to turn 18, in order to tell the story from their point of view.
This is made even more difficult by the presence of a rival from Amanda’s old newspapering days. Amanda despises Oliver Menzies and invents multiple ways to trip him up. If you prefer likable heroines, look elsewhere, because Amanda routinely lies to her sources, and her torment of Oliver nearly drives him mad.
What Amanda’s research reveals runs contrary to the conventional wisdom about the case. It’s something like a cover-up of a cover-up, and when that much energy goes into suppressing the truth, there’s bound to be danger.
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels doesn’t have the harmony of plot, style, and tone that made Hallett’s previous books so appealing—she’s going for something darker and more ambiguous here, albeit with emojis. She dedicates the book to three women who lost their lives searching for the truth about terrible crimes, raising doubts about the cost of such obsessiveness. It’s a disconcerting read, no one’s idea of a “holiday page-turner,” and is, mostly, better for it.
With numerous characters pursuing various agendas, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels is Janice Hallett’s twistiest, most penetrating novel yet.
Mariah Fredericks’s Edith Wharton is far too well bred to develop an obsession with the murder of a novelist she barely knew, but the fact that he died on her birthday after being gunned down in front of the Princeton Club piques her curiosity.
Fredericks, who brought insight and sensitivity to an infamous true story in The Lindbergh Nanny, uses the lesser-known murder of the muckraking journalist and popular novelist David Graham Phillips as a jumping-off point for a fictional investigation by the socially prominent Gilded Age author, most known at that point for The House of Mirth.
While preparing to sell her house in New York, Edith is staying at the Belmont Hotel, where she’s having tea with her publisher when they encounter Phillips. His white suit—in winter!—and hard-charging manner grate on her, but he makes a strong impression. When he’s shot the next day, and the police come up empty-handed, Edith is shocked that this could happen to a fellow writer. So she begins to make inquiries, jumping to some wrong conclusions but getting sharper as she goes along.
The investigation enables Edith to interact with—and sometimes suspect—fellow members of the social 400 and other prominent figures of the day, such as her friend Henry James and, in a charming phone call, the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart. Fredericks peels away the grande dame façade to create a plausible, sympathetic character dealing with a deteriorating older husband and ruminating on the ravages of age as she approaches 50.
Writing about Phillips’s murder also allows Fredericks to highlight a dynamic period in New York’s history. “This is the city now, but soon we will be bigger, noisier, more crowded,” Edith muses. “Love nothing, attach your affections to no street, nor building nor park, for we will knock it over in an instant and rebuild.”
A quick Google search will reveal the killer’s identity, but where’s the fun in that? His story is stranger than fiction, and Fredericks sets it up neatly, if not 100 percent accurately, to fit her narrative. Fans of HBO’s The Gilded Age who want more depth about this era, as well as admirers of the woman herself, will be enthralled.
Mariah Fredericks’s The Wharton Plot uses the little-known murder of a muckraking journalist and novelist as a jumping-off point for a fictional investigation by the Gilded Age author.
The small vacation town of Shaky Lake in northern Wisconsin couldn’t be farther from Wharton’s New York, but she would have recognized a fellow stalwart in the county sheriff, Marge North. Despite heading a tiny department that’s ill-equipped to deal with anything more serious than a bar fight, Marge has a spine of steel and deep reserves of compassion.
She’s also carrying her alcoholic son, Eli, on her staff in a last-ditch effort to save him from himself. Though once a skilled investigator, he’s self-medicating for PTSD he developed after a stint in Afghanistan and is exactly the wrong person to answer a nighttime call to a resort where a teenage boy lies dead in a boat.
So when the dead boy’s girlfriend disappears, Marge calls on the F.B.I. for help. Eli and the whip-smart young female agent they send from Chicago make an uneasy team—he is wildly unreliable, but she recognizes his fundamental intelligence. And, as she wryly points out, he looks like a Disney prince.
The murder-kidnapping turns out to be the tip of the iceberg in a case that leads to an opulent country club that caters to the enablers of Big Pharma. Marge’s motley department looks to be in over its head, and possibly in danger.
Northwoods is the debut of Amy Pease, a nurse practitioner from Wisconsin, who begins her book with a trigger warning. I’m not sure any thriller requires one, but Pease’s uncompromising depiction of Eli’s struggle will be painfully real to anyone who has experienced PTSD or addiction. And that is exactly what makes the book stand out, along with its steamy vacation-town-in-August ambience, relatable characters, and ambitious plot that takes on the opioid epidemic. If Edith Wharton can be a detective, this gifted nurse practitioner most definitely can be a writer.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books at AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City
