Secrets Typed in Blood

July 1, 2022

Someone is imitating Holly Quick's pulp-magazine tales of revenge to the letter, strewing 1947 New York's streets with dead bodies, and Holly quickly turns to Willowjean "Will" Parker and her boss, legendary detective Lillian Pentecost, for help. They've got to investigate the murders and find the culprit without alerting the police. Next in the Nero Award--winning "Pentecost and Parker Mystery" series.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 12, 2022
It’s 1947 in Spotswood’s strong third mystery featuring Lillian Pentecost, “the greatest detective in New York City,” and her assistant, Willowjean “Will” Parker (after 2021’s Murder Under Her Skin), and the duo’s newest client, Holly Quick, arrives with a particularly knotty problem. “Somebody is stealing my murders,” Holly declares. A prolific writer for a pulp magazine called Strange Crimes, she’s certain that someone is using the details in the stories she pens under the name Horace Bellow as the basis for three recent murders. Indeed, the descriptions of a hanging in Stuyvesant Square, a stabbing in Sunnyside, and a suspicious death at an antique shop on the Upper East Side all closely match her stories. Holly wants the detectives to investigate, but without tipping their hand to the cops, as it seems she has some secrets of her own to protect. Spotswood plays fair with readers in a complex plot offering plenty of vivid characters, clever dialogue, and plausible suspects. Pentecost and Parker are a great crime-fighting partnership whose popularity is bound to increase. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary.

October 1, 2022
Early 1947 provides Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker with a baffling new case and a continuation of an old one that just won't go away. Someone has been copying prolific pulp magazine writer Holly Quick's stories. And it's not just an ordinary plagiarist, but someone who's bringing them to sanguinary life and death. The job Holly offers the one-eyed private eye and her hand-picked sidekick--to identify and decommission the copycat killer--should be straightforward, but it comes with a raft of restrictions. Holly won't permit Lillian and Willow to go to the police or reveal her identity as the person behind all her male pseudonyms. She hides important information from them that they really need to know. Lillian is determined to start the investigation during the same two-week period when Willow is already unhappily undercover as secretary Jean Palmer at the law firm of Shirley & Wise, where her predecessor as Kenneth Shirley's secretary was criminal mastermind Olivia Waterhouse, an old adversary of Lillian's whose motives for her masquerade are a lot less clear than Willow's. As if these aren't enough difficulties, Darryl Klinghorn, the bedroom-peeping shamus Lillian hires to gather information on the three victims murdered in homages to Holly's fiction, ends up getting killed himself, running his inquiries into an emphatic dead end. Both cases have their high points (lots of curveballs and some smartly retro feminism) and their low (the copycat is eventually unmasked as an entirely marginal figure, and the windup of the Waterhouse case is at once melodramatic, anticlimactic, and inconclusive). Untidy but undeniably engaging.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.