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.