Murder between the Lines

March 27, 2017
Vatsal’s lively second Kitty Weeks mystery (after 2016’s A Front Page Affair) finds 19-year-old Kitty still working on the New York Sentinel Ladies’ Page, the paper’s only section open to female reporters. While writing about elite girls’ school Westfield Hall in December 1915, Kitty meets star chemistry student Elspeth Bright. Late on Christmas Eve, Elspeth freezes to death in Central Park. Her lifelong somnambulism is blamed, but Kitty suspects foul play. When a schoolmate claims that Elspeth was secretly working on battery design, a crucial challenge of submarine warfare, Kitty questions Elspeth’s father, scientist Edgar Bright, with whom Elspeth argued shortly before her death. Dr. Bright’s secretive behavior and the presence of his handsome former assistant, Phillip Emerson—to whom gossip suggests Elspeth might have been attracted—at a submarine-test explosion further fuels Kitty’s suspicions. Despite several overlong detours into historical side issues, Vatsal’s combination of a feisty protagonist with a tumultuous, fast-changing era remains a winning formula. Agent: Christina Hogrebe, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

May 1, 2017
While researching a story, Capability Kitty Weeks, a reporter for the Ladies' Page of the New York Sentinel, meets Elspeth Bright, a student studying physics and chemistry, at Westfield Hall, a well-regarded boarding school for young women. Only a short time later, Kitty is stunned to learn Elspeth has died of exposure during a sleepwalking episode while at home in New York City; then Elspeth's mother asks Kitty to talk to Elspeth's friends to determine what triggered her sleepwalking. Kitty pursues the matter, beginning to believe that Elspeth's death may be connected to her scientific studies, as President Wilson prepares the country to enter WWI. World history, science, the women's suffrage movement, and the life and times of early twentieth-century America are skillfully woven through the story of a privileged young woman finding her place in the world, while investigating a death. For readers who enjoy historical mysteries with young female reporters such as Carol McCleary's Nellie Bly and Alyssa Maxwell's Emma Cross.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)