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.
