An Honest Living

February 1, 2022

In The Paper Caper, Carlisle's latest "Bibliophile Mystery," murder transpires at the first annual Mark Twain Festival, held by Brooklyn Wainwright at her bookstore and underwritten by media magnate Joseph Cabot. In Castillo's The Hidden One, Amish elders turn to Painters Mill chief of police Kate Burkholder when the remains of a long-vanished bishop are discovered, bearing evidence of foul play (150,000-copy first printing). Private informer Flavia Albia's next Desperate Undertaking is finding a serial killer (or killers) committing brutal murder and staging the corpses around Davis's first-century CE Rome (30,000-copy first printing). In Hokuloa Road, cross genre-writing, Shirley Jackson Award-winning Hand makes Grady Kendall caretaker of a luxury property in Hawaii (as far as possible from his native Maine), then has him hunting for a young woman from his flight who has since vanished (30,000-copy first printing). In McCall Smith's The Sweet Remnants of Summer, Isabel Dalhousie is serving on an advisory committee for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery when she is caught up in the squabbles of a prominent family where Nationalist vs. Socialist ideologies prevail. In Peril at the Exposition, a follow-up to March's Edgar finalist debut, Murder in Old Bombay, newlyweds Capt. Jim Agnihotri and Diana Framji have left British-ruled Bombay (now Mumbai) for 1890s Boston when Jim is sent to investigate a murder in Chicago (50,000-copy first printing). In Munier's The Wedding Plot, Mercy's grandmother Patience is set to marry her longtime beloved at the five-star Lady's Slipper Inn when family enmities bubble to the surface, the inn's spa director vanishes, and a stranger turns up dead (30,000-copy first printing). In An Honest Living--a debut from Murphy, editor in chief of CrimeReads, Literary Hub's crime fiction vertical--an attorney picking up odd jobs after walking out on his stranglehold law firm agrees to help reclusive literati Anna Reddick find her possibly thieving bookseller husband, and all's well until the real Anna Reddick walks in. In Rosenfelt's Holy Chow, an older woman who adopts sweet senior chow mix Tessie from Andy Carpenter's Tara Foundation makes Andy promise that if she dies he will take care of Tessie provided that her son cannot--which he certainly can't when he is arrested days later on suspicion of his mother's murder (60,000-copy first printing).

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May 9, 2022
The New York attorney who narrates Murphy’s uneven debut—who is unnamed but hints he has a name similar to the author’s—gave up a career with a prestigious law firm to make an honest living in a solo practice doing odd jobs, contract work, and document reviews, but his earnings have been slim of late. Then a wealthy woman calling herself Anna Rennick approaches him, claiming that her much older estranged husband, a former antiquarian book dealer, is stealing rare books from her library. The narrator can’t resist her $10,000 fee as well as a potential bonus if he can catch her husband offering any of her books for sale. Something about the case bothers him, but he manages “to put it out of mind” and he winds it up with little effort. The trouble begins when the real Anna Rennick shows up, threatening to sue. Murphy, the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, writes with authority about the New York book world and literary references abound, from Edith Wharton to Cormac McCarthy, but the novel’s digressive first half drags and the plot never picks up much speed. This is destined to amuse a niche audience at best. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi.

June 1, 2022
When a lawyer's investigation leads him into the New York rare book world, he finds himself embroiled in a drama of corruption and lies. Hired by wealthy Anna Reddick to prove that her husband, whom she's about to divorce, has been selling her rare books, the unnamed narrator infiltrates the Poquelin Society, "a scholarly society dedicated to the art, science and preservation of the book, whatever that meant," in order to entrap him into a "controlled buy." This seemingly easy job will lead the narrator to a second one that involves a probable suicide wrapped in a convoluted web of impersonation and misdirection and book auctions, and then leads him to a small-time crook who's suddenly hit it big with waterfront development in Brooklyn. The investigation also puts him in the path of an eccentric female novelist who seems to have stepped out of the pages of Hemingway or Chandler with an edgy charm and casual cruelty that only make her more fascinating. The novel is set in 2005, but the style and the narrative voice feel comfortably rooted in earlier decades. The self-conscious tone and the nostalgia--characters go see old movies and talk about old books--render the plot almost secondary to the setting. In the end, not that much happens, but the characters live and love and fight and die against a backdrop of New York City, its seasons and its landmarks, its underbelly and its flaws. The lawyer/detective ends his quest a little more jaded, a little sadder than he began. To quote a movie that is frequently invoked here, "Forget it...it's Chinatown." A bittersweet love letter to New York and times gone by. More style than substance, but fans of noir fiction will feel right at home.

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July 1, 2022
John Dunning's Cliff Janeway used to be the only hard-boiled bibliophile in crime fiction (The Sign of the Book, 2004). Then Leonard Padura's Mario Conde (Havana Fever, 2009) joined the group, and now there's the unnamed narrator of this debut novel from the editor-in-chief of Crime Reads. Set in the early 2000s, the novel traces the peregrinations around Manhattan and Brooklyn of an ""odd-job lawyer"" who takes the case of a woman who believes her father is stealing her rare books. It's a job from heaven for our book-loving hero, but foul play in the book trade soon morphs into a real-estate swindle. The wandering plot is really just an excuse for Murphy to muse on New York and books (""Greenpoint was a small, melancholy neighborhood that made you feel like you were in a Conrad novel . . . the air heavy with mosquitoes and regret.""). With atmosphere like that, who cares about plot? Well, some do, and they may be a bit puzzled here, but for those who covet ""reading in a bar with lousy lighting and good air conditioning,"" this one is pure pleasure.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2022

DEBUT An impressive debut noir from the CrimeReads website's editor in chief. In mid-2000s Brooklyn, a disillusioned lawyer gets by with any odd jobs thrown his way, including a quick $10,000 payday involving one Anna Reddick, who asks him to dig up some dirt on her much older husband Newton, a rare book dealer who she claims sold off valuable titles from the family collection, to fund their divorce. Easy enough, until the real Anna Reddick, a celebrated novelist, shows up on the lawyer's doorstep looking for the man who slandered her husband. Who set him up, and where is Newton now? To answer those questions, the unnamed protagonist is drawn into a world of antiquarian booksellers, among other quintessential New York characters, as well as the world of the elusive, brilliant woman who's spending more and more time at his apartment. VERDICT Murphy's writing is smart, ruminative, and referential. His narrator knows he's in a story that mirrors the plot of the film Chinatown, and though the mystery itself is light on twists, it's all worth it for this lovingly rendered snapshot of an already-bygone city, with details reeking of authenticity, down to the last barstool.--Michael Pucci

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.