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!

Incredibly fun debut of a new mystery series. Looking forward to the next installment.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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THE OVERSIMPLIFIED SETUP
It's a gender-flipped Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin. Instead of staying home habitually because of eccentricity, detective Lillian Pentecost has multiple sclerosis. Her assistant, Willowjean “Will” Parker has a much more colorful history than Archie Goodwin—she spent years in the circus after running away from a terrible home in her teens. Will is game to get physical with suspects if necessary, but she's not up to Archie's level and doesn't necessarily give as good as she gets.

Pentecost is much more active outside the home than Wolfe, and the pair are more socially active—with social consciences that would be far more at home in Twenty-First century American than in the 1940s. But largely the duo operates like their archetypes.

WHAT'S FORTUNE FAVORS THE DEAD ABOUT?
The book begins with how the two met and started working together, then it jumps three years to after the partnership had been established and prospective clients show up.

A year ago, Abigail Collins' husband shot himself when it looked like everything was going the way the steel magnate wanted it to (in the mid-1940s, selling steel to the U.S. Government was a license to print money). Now, she's been murdered, and her body was found in the same chair as her husband. Her son, daughter, and an old family friend (now head of the company) come to Pentecost to do what the police have been unable to—find the killer and assuage the worries of the company's stockholders.

It's practically a true-locked room mystery, which gets Pentecost's attention. As an added bonus for the detectives, hovering around the case is a famed spiritualist that Pentecost has been wanting to expose for a fraud.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT FORTUNE FAVORS THE DEAD?
When it comes to re-imaginings, or characters based on Wolfe/Archie, I thought this was one of the more inventive and successful (DeAndra's Lobo Black/Quinn Booker might be better, but it's been so long since I read it, I'm not sure). Don't take anything negative I say—or if I'm not that enthusiastic about it—as being a reaction to being a Wolfe purist.

When you think of Stout's works—it's about the case, the mystery. Sure, you stick around because of the characters—but it's about watching the characters at work in and around the case. This was about Will Palmer first and foremost—with Pentecost clearly a secondary character—and her relationships/interactions with the principals related to the case and her background. The next priority of the novel was in creating and revealing the world of Pentecost and Palmer—how they were active in it and related to people in the world. The case—and everything else—came in as a tertiary concern.

This is all fine and good for a first novel—but it didn't seem to fit the setup either as something modeled on Wolfe/Archie novels, or as something in a vaguer 1940s detective mold. That's me carrying in assumptions to the text, I realize. But it still felt like Smallwood's emphasis was misplaced.

The mystery/mysteries were clever enough and the plotlines were well-executed, and the emotional beats—particularly in the final chapter—were handled perfectly by both Spotswood and Porter.

Fortune Favors the Dead was not the novel I expected, but it was good enough to get me to come back for the second in the series.

Seriously such a great book. I loved the wittiness, the mystery, our main characters. All of it. I found no flaws.