Last Call at the Nightingale

Good Jazz Age atmosphere, a lively and believable heroine, and a dead body outside the Nightingale club make this book easy to fall into. The writing is competent, the characters well sketched from the start, and trouble unfolds around dance-loving Vivian faster than her cranky neighbour can think up her next complaint.

Questions pile up about people Vivian likes as well as those she can’t stand. The dead man lurks, tainting Vivian’s desire to return to the Nightingale even though she’s sure of her welcome by the friendly bartender, Danny, and fascinated by the enigmatic owner, Hux. Then there's the debonair mystery man who showed up right around the time of the murder and seems willing to buy Viv's between-dance drinks forever. And a flapper socialite's frustrated boyfriend. And Viv's equally frustrated sister, who stays home, works hard, and can't understand how Viv can risk police raids and poisoning by bootleg booze just to go dancing night after night.

The narrator doesn’t give a lot of inflection early on, and you have to listen carefully to the words to know which character is talking. But after a few chapters she settles into the voices, especially Vivian’s, and lets the story unfold through emotion as well as the words.

There are a few jarring switches in Vivian’s audacity/bravery that threw me off a bit, but overall this is a competent, well-crafted, and absorbing Jazz Age mystery.

 

#Netgalley #mystery #JazzAge #BlindPig #Speakeasy