Vienna--A Novel

August 3, 2015
The pairing of unusual amateur detectives is the best part of Kirby’s first novel, an offbeat mystery. In Brussels, Belgium, Justine Am, an American med student turned supermodel, has a one-night stand, on a bet, with a woman she knows only as Vienna, who turns out to be a socially awkward savant. Justine has no intention of prolonging the acquaintance, but circumstances dictate otherwise after Justine’s latest boyfriend, Grant Eriksson, is found shot to death in her hotel suite, and the police call in Vienna for questioning. When news of Vienna’s fling with the celebrity supermodel reaches the press, Vienna loses her job, and Justine takes her in out of guilt. Impressed by Vienna’s deductive abilities, Justine teams with her to solve Grant’s murder. En route to a solution, the duo must learn why some statues that Justine posed in front of moved overnight, and they must also crack an obscure code. Some readers may find the eccentricity of the leads insufficient to carry the plot. Agent: Linn Prentis, Linn Prentis Agency.

July 1, 2015
A chance-or is it?-meeting in a Brussels club leads to a strange love affair between two women as the pair is plunged into a trans-European treasure hunt. In Kirby's debut, high-end American fashion model Justine Am finds herself inexplicably attracted to Vienna, a shy, socially awkward British girl she sleeps with following a bet with friends. While terms like "autistic savant" and "eidetic memory" are tossed around to describe Vienna's uncanny abilities-she's able to rattle off spools of information based on a single word, much like a human Wikipedia-her condition is frustratingly never made clear. When Justine's bad-boy boyfriend, Grant Eriksson, is found murdered in his hotel bathroom, Justine doesn't make the connection to her latest fashion shoot, "Clay to Flesh," where the models pose with eerily lifelike wooden mannequins, until Vienna notices a discrepancy in the size of the mannequins. This prompts the pair, who are both under police scrutiny for Grant's murder, to dig deeper into the rich history of the mannequins, where they discover that the prized pieces contain clues to the location of the equivalent of the Habsburg Empire's Holy Grail, a gem known as the Star of Memphis. Luckily, Justine has seemingly limitless financial resources, allowing the two to hopscotch around the continent in pursuit of the gem, all the while trying to avoid the expected henchmen intent on killing them. Borrowing loosely from Conan Doyle, with Vienna's Holmes-ian mind and a plot similar to "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons," Kirby crafts an entertaining if sometimes-meandering tale.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.