The Family Way

January 14, 2013
Set in 1904, Bowen’s well-paced 12th mystery featuring feisty and endearing Molly Murphy (after 2012’s Hush Now, Don’t You Cry) finds Molly unable to resist taking on a missing persons case, despite her promise to her new husband, NYPD Capt. Daniel Sullivan, to give up detecting now that their first baby is on the way. Molly receives a letter from a woman in Ireland seeking news of her orphaned niece, Maureen O’Byrne, who wrote on arriving in New York City a year earlier that she had secured a job as an under–parlor maid with a Mrs. Mainwaring. The aunt has heard nothing from Maureen since. With the last name of Maureen’s employer her only lead, Molly plunges into a thorough investigation of the maid’s fate. The usual full-blooded characters will keep readers engaged, but series fans may wonder how Molly will juggle sleuthing with increased domestic demands in future installments. Agent: Meg Ruley, the Jane Rotrosen Agency.

February 1, 2013
Neither retirement nor pregnancy can put a good detective out to pasture. Molly Murphy Sullivan has promised her police captain husband, Daniel, that she'll quit investigating and settle down to become a housewife. Restless and uncomfortable in the heat of a New York City summer, she gets a letter addressed to her old agency: A couple from Ireland want her to find their niece Maureen O'Byrne, who worked for the Mainwaring family before she went missing. Surely Daniel won't mind her asking a few innocent questions? But her husband is furious when she witnesses a baby kidnapping--one of the cases he's working--while visiting a domestic agency in search of a maid. He wants her to travel to cooler Westchester, stay with his mother and give up detective work. Daniel would be even more angry if he knew that Molly had gone back to the agency, trying to track down the Mainwarings, and bumped into her younger brother Liam, who's on the run from the English and illegally in the country on business for the Brotherhood, which will do anything to gain independence for Ireland. Molly agrees to go to Westchester when she learns that the Mainwarings live nearby. She asks her two neighbors to come stay at a nearby inn so that she'll have an excuse to get away from her mother-in-law and keep sleuthing, a decision that will put her life in danger. Feisty Molly (Hush Now, Don't You Cry, 2012, etc.) unravels another knotty case while providing insight into life just after the turn of that other century.

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March 1, 2013

Despite her pregnancy, Molly Murphy Sullivan can't seem to stay away from sleuthing. In this, her 12th entry (after Hush Now, Don't You Cry), she becomes embroiled in the Irish freedom movement of the early 20th century. [See Prepub Alert, 10/08/12.]

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2013
Anthony and Agatha Awardwinning Rhys Bowen's series about Molly Murphy, a bubbly Irish immigrant in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, is now in its thirteenth installment. Molly, who has always had a gift for getting to the bottom of things, established her own private detective agency in New York. Now, though, she is married to a police captain, is named Sullivan rather than Murphy, and is pregnant. When she receives a letter begging for her help in locating a disappeared Irish maidservantand when she subsequently learns that five infants have been kidnapped in the same monthMolly is ready to take action, but her husband ships her off for an enforced rest with her mother. Ah, but Molly is nothing if not dauntless. The ways she finds to keep investigating, and the trouble she lands in as a result of that investigation, will be more than enough to keep series fans satisfied. Others may be puzzled by the (at times) overly simplistic writing here, which gives the book a tone not in keeping with its subject matter.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)