A woman-led mystery set in the Jazz and Prohibition era of 1920s America. While the main character, Vivian, leads us on a tight, dark, and dangerous mystery, the characters surrounding her also come alive in the book. It is always a pleasure to find a well-drawn cast of the characters to reinforce the heroine’s story instead of cliched cardboard cutouts sometimes found in other mystery books. Like Vivian, they are complex people driven by a host of wants and needs that sometimes lean on the side of less than legal opportunities. Delve into the dark side of a tough world that underlies the Roaring 20s we are typically shown in books and movies. It is a world of life, death, jazz music, and love.
I am waiting for the third book in the series (The Last Note of Warning) at the moment from the library, where I get the majority of my reading material, both ebooks and traditional print books.
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From Amazon…
New York, 1924. Vivian Kelly’s days are filled with drudgery, from the tenement lodging she shares with her sister to the dress shop where she sews for hours every day.
But at night, she escapes to The Nightingale, an underground dance hall where illegal liquor flows and the band plays the Charleston with reckless excitement. With a bartender willing to slip her a free glass of champagne and friends who know the owner, Vivian can lose herself in the music. No one asks where she came from or how much money she has. No one bats an eye if she flirts with men or women as long as she can keep up on the dance floor. At The Nightingale, Vivian forgets the dangers of Prohibition-era New York and finds a place that feels like home.
But then she discovers a body behind the club, and those dangers come knocking.
Caught in a police raid at the Nightingale, Vivian discovers that the dead man wasn’t the nameless bootlegger he first appeared. With too many people assuming she knows more about the crime than she does, Vivian finds herself caught between the dangers of the New York’s underground and the world of the city’s wealthy and careless, where money can hide any sin and the lives of the poor are considered disposable…including Vivian’s own.
Other books in this series: