Murder in the City of Liberty

April 15, 2019
A professional and potentially romantic pair dig into connected cases, one on housing development and one on discrimination against a local baseball great. Chicago, 1940. Luca Valari may be a crook, but he's enough of a softie to keep his cousin, clean-cut Hamish DeLuca, away from his interest in a housing development in Boston's Fiske's Wharf. Back in Beantown, Hamish and his investigative partner, Regina "Reggie" Van Buren, are drawn in to whatever is going on at the wharf, though at first they don't connect Luca to their own work. In the two years since some sort of showdown with Luca at the Flamingo (Murder at the Flamingo, 2018), the New Haven-native Van Buren, whose insistence on working and wearing pants fits in with her modern-girl ideals, has formed a detective agency with the anxious Canadian who can't keep his eyes off her. After the two are as quickly fired as hired on the Fiske's Wharf project, they decide to look into it on their own time and dime, relying on Hamish's buddy Nate Reis, an expert in housing development, for more information. The city is awash in xenophobia linked to the Christian Patriots, who've been proselytizing around town. Things get complicated when black baseball player Errol Parker hires Reggie and Hamish to look into some pranks that seem to be escalating to bullying and beyond. Meanwhile, Reggie, who's getting parental pressure to marry former flame Vaughan Vanderlaan, is still exploring her feelings for Hamish. He loves her, she loves him, but the corresponding will-they, won't-they plotline is dragged out without raising the stakes, taking up substantial real estate without yielding much payoff. McMillan's period romance supplies conscientious of-the-time detail, well-researched background, a murder halfway through that gets wrapped up miles before the end, and a barely-there baseball subplot. None of it will keep you up past your bedtime.

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