Death at the Paris Exposition

July 18, 2016
McNamara’s charming sixth Emily Cabot mystery (after 2014’s Death in Chinatown) captures the Art Nouveau ambiance of Paris during the opening of the World’s Fair of 1900. The first key scene, set in the hallowed fashion house of the couturier Worth, demonstrates that the author is a dedicated follower of fashion. Tea gowns, wedding dresses, walking suits, and evening attire are lovingly detailed, as are the hats—many as big as serving platters and festooned with feathers, silk roses, bows, and veils. Emily, a university lecturer, wife, and mother, is in Paris serving as the private secretary of Chicago socialite Bertha Palmer, the one woman serving as a U.S. commissioner to the exposition. Historic figures, such as the impressionist painters Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas, as well as scions of the Worth and Cartier clans, mingle easily with the fictional cast. Rapacious mothers, intent on seeing their offspring married to titled Europeans; jewel thefts; and murder accessorize the plot.

July 1, 2016
The 1900 Paris Exposition provides a glittering backdrop for murder, theft, and high fashion.Emily Chapman considers herself very fortunate to be in Paris, along with her physician husband and children, as the social secretary for Mrs. Bertha Palmer. Emily never imagined visiting the House of Worth, where Mrs. Palmer has insisted on buying her a costume while ordering her own magnificent wardrobe, fit for the only female commissioner representing the U.S. They're accompanied by Honore Palmer and his friend Lord James Lawford, who are transporting Mrs. Palmer's valuable pearl necklace. Others visiting the same day are wealthy Mrs. Johnstone, her daughter, and two friends, well-known artist Mary Cassatt, and the Countess Olga Zugenev, and her daughter, Sonya. When Mrs. Palmer's pearls go missing, she's reluctant to make a fuss until another valuable jewel is stolen at a party celebrating the engagement of M. Worth's daughter to a son of the house of Cartier. The next day the family meets Inspector Guillaume, who had a similar experience in 1889 with a clever gang of jewel thieves, a gang whose ringleader was never caught. The Palmer pearls turn up on a mannequin at a House of Worth exhibit along with the dead body of a young woman who occasionally worked for Worth. Since the Inspector seems determined to suspect Honore, Mrs. Palmer, who knows that Emily has solved crimes in the past (Death at Chinatown, 2014, etc.), asks her to prove him innocent. Although she speaks almost no French, Emily can hardly refuse. A second death only spurs her on to help the Palmer family.Historical detail, intriguing real-life characters, and a complex mystery are nearly overwhelmed by detailed descriptions of period attire that only a hard-core fashionista could love.

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