Victorian whodunit a belter of a book

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/08/2022 (1509 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Betrothed but thankfully properly chaperoned Winnipeggers Rev. Charles Lauchlan and pioneering female physicist Maggie Skene join an Orient Express-calibre group of cyclists in the 1900 Scottish Highlands — oh dear, what could possibly happen in a murder mystery?

Winnipeg author Catherine Macdonald will have you checking flight and train schedules to Inverness while giving us a fascinating cast of biblical scholars behaving scandalously, suffragettes, socialists, scoundrels, women defying Victorian constraints, cads — even a Métis cop sleuthing a tad outside his Red River jurisdiction.

Published in May 2021 and winner of the Michael Van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction at the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards, So Many Windings (At Bay Press, 304 pages, $29) is an absolutely crackerjack of a yarn — let’s hope the young couple is back in Winnipeg for further adventures soon.

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Aristocratic British socialite Elena Standish and her stiff-upper-lip family travel to Washington in the early 1930s to visit her American grandparents — grandpa a powerful industrialist, isolationist, white supremacist and possible Nazi ally. Not good.

At a lavish party, there’s a murder, with hints of atomic secrets being passed to Berlin. Good thing no one knows frivolous Elena, whom no one really notices, is a double-ought spy in training.

Published in September 2021, Anne Perry’s A Darker Reality (Ballantine Books, 307 pages, $37) is quite talky and often repetitively so, observing the bourgeois elite as they cynically manipulate the fates of the masses, a slow but decent little mystery. Out in paperback in early September.

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A notorious Glasgow hard man gets a bullet in the brains in the idyllic highlands as Sgt. Hamish Macbeth is besotted by his new constable, swooning over her while big-city evil stalks the glens.

From an outline by the series’ late author M.C. Beaton and fleshed out by R.W. Green, Death of a Green-Eyed Monster (Grand Central Publishing, 240 pages, $34) has Macbeth sleuthing for the 35th time in his rural backwater where he’d much prefer to be left alone to tend to his pets and hang out with the eccentric locals.

Alas, it reads like an outline — the book needs another 100 pages to develop a plot and bring characters to life.

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A single mother/radical crusading against the horrors of the Industrial Revolution and the evil rich who own the hellish factories is murdered, leaving two young orphans and a piece of paper bearing the name and address of amateur sleuth Leo Stanhope.

Stanhope lies to the police about ever having met her (spoiler alert, he had, just the day before) yet feels himself drawn in to the wee bairns’ plight, though it endangers his Really Big Secret: that until leaving home at 15, Stanhope was a girl named Charlotte Pritchard.

Alex Reeve’s The Anarchists’ Club (Felony & Mayhem Press, 336 pages, $24) is a convoluted, complex tale replete with social issues of decent peasants trying to survive the 1860s.

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Vaguely postwar, Irish state pathologist one-name Quirke and his wife are vacationing in Spain when the good doctor, in his inebriated state, sees a woman who supposedly died in Ireland years before.

And soon, his daughter and a morose Dublin cop are in Spain seeing if it’s true, and a very politically powerful and utterly sick Irish family has dispatched a Cockney hitman to make sure the job is done right this time.

Published in October 2021 and coming in paperback next month, John Banville’s April in Spain (John Banville, Hanover Square Press, 320 pages, $35) is exceedingly well-written, by a Booker Prize-winning author, but so doom-laden — a tragedy rooted in the evils of a church orphanage.

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Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin would certainly not have continued reading had brilliant Winnipeg author Catherine Macdonald not made it exceedingly clear the engaged young couple were properly chaperoned on an otherwise shocking outing.