Tell Me, Pretty Maiden

January 21, 2008
Several cases keep Molly Murphy busy in Agatha-winner Bowen’s winning seventh mystery to star the Irish immigrant PI (after 2007’s In Dublin’s Fair City
). In December 1902, Molly and her beau, suspended New York City police captain Daniel Sullivan, stumble on a near-dead young woman in a Central Park snowdrift. Her passions roused, Molly sets out to discover the identity of the poor traumatized creature and that of whoever cast her into the snow “clad only in a flimsy white dress.” Meanwhile, leading actress Blanche Lovejoy hires Molly to look into the ghostly shenanigans that threaten disaster for Blanche’s soon-to-open new play. Molly also agrees to help a wealthy society matron who wishes to know if her missing Yale student nephew has vanished because of the murder he’s suspected of committing. Theatrical life becomes the hinge on which everything swings, and Molly gamely takes to the stage as part of her assignment. It’s all in a day’s work for this delightfully spunky heroine.

March 1, 2008
It's tough being a female PI in New York City in 1902, but Molly Murphy, through sheer persistence, is making it work. In this seventh addition to Bowen's Agatha Awardwinning series (after "In Dublin's Fair City"), Molly and her police captain beau, Daniel Sullivan, find a young woman lying unconscious in the snow. Bowen keeps the story moving as Molly's efforts to find out how the victim ended up that way take her from Broadway's theaters to the flophouses of lower Manhattan. There is never a simple answer to questions in Bowen's fiction, and this engaging novel is no exception. A great series for those who like stories about women who face impossible odds but make their lives work, à la mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear and Kathy Lynn Emerson. [Library marketing campaign planned.Ed.]

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2008
For readers who love mysteries more for character development than puzzle solving, the seventh Molly Murphy novel, set in early-twentieth-century New York City, does not disappoint, despite its reliance on a fairly formulaic plot. Molly, a charmingly conflicted sleuth with the requisite shady past, is hired to spy on a potential suitor for a wealthy Jewish family but also must deal with a drama queens paranoiac fear and a troubling missing-persons caseand, on top of all that, she rescues a beautiful amnesiac found senseless in the snow. Luckily, she has the help of her love interest, Daniel, the chauvinistic, dishonored former policeman, and a slew of influential friends, including Nelly Bly, to sort out all the inevitably interconnected plotlines. Molly may lack the psychological depth of Jacqueline Winspears Maisie Dobbs, whose series is set in England after World War I, but Bowen makes the most of her New York locale and strikes a similar tone with her engaging female detective.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)