Fortune Favors the Dead

OK, this was actually really so entertaining and enjoyable than I had any reason to expect it to be. I picked it up the title intrigued me in the library and it seemed to have fairly good reviews, but I've been bamboozled by good reviews and aesthetic covers before. Mystery novels are nowadays a dime a dozen, so I was expecting something merely to pass the time but this book was actually more than that.

Willowjean Parker, or Will as she prefers to call herself, is a small-time circus act who gets accidentally caught up in a crime and thus into the orbit of Lilian Pentecost, genius lady detective with a progressive disease. They strike up a investigative partnership and get onto the track of solving crimes together in New York City. Years into their partnership, they are approached to solve a locked-room murder mystery. Abigail Collins, wealthy matriarch of the Collins company, was found bludgeoned to death in her room at her own Halloween party, and the immediate gossip that goes up is that it was the ghost of her late husband, Alistair Collins who had committed suicide a year earlier, that had done it.

Now, rest assured that there isn't any kind of weird supernatural twist to this book. It's a straight up mystery-thriller set in the 1940s, with a lot of free love to boot. There's m/m, f/f, and bisexual representation here but it's delicately portrayed that it doesn't feel like a 21st century work masquerading as historical fiction. It does take into account prevailing social mores of the time, and combined with something that at least sounds like 1940s slang to my layperson's point of view, it did surprisingly well in immersing me in a believable 1940s setting. Will Parker is our narrator and protagonist for the whole novel and there's something about her that does make me want to root for her, which is great.

The solution was satisfyingly unexpected and the pacing was excellent. The book kept me guessing for most of it, and surprise developments kept me on my toes. I guessed about 20% of the solution (I strongly suspected that Becca had murdered Ariel Belestrade because her alibi of being “locked in her room all night” crying over Will just felt very flimsy.) but the rest had been somewhat unexpected and everything fell into place quite nicely, tying up loose ends coming from the very beginning of the mystery, which is exactly what a good cozy mystery ought to be imo!

Thoughts on the ending: I loved that we had a little epilogue with Olivia Waterhouse - a sort of pseudo-altruistic female Moriarty? Very excited to see where that's going to turn up, and I love how the McCloskey case which introduced Will to Lilian in the first place is probably going to end up being one link in the overarching case with Waterhouse. I did suspect Becca to be Belestrade's murderer, but hadn't figured her to be the murderer of her own mother too. I loved that little touch with John Meredith being the twins' father, I hadn't expected that one and really thought he was just getting sleazy with Becca. I kinda figured that the twins' father wasn't going to be Alistair. Thought it might have been Harrison at first, but after the book pointed that out explicitly, I gave up on that line and imagined it to be someone else entirely, but somehow hadn't thought of Meredith.

Overall, a very well-paced and well-written mystery that was both engaging and entertaining throughout. I'd be interested to check out the rest of the series!