Debut
Set in 1921 Philly, this lively series debut finds its characters affected by both the war and the influenza pandemic. Heroine Edie Shippen returns home after suffering through the flu and nursing her San Francisco aunt just in time for her twin sister Frances’ engagement party to Edie’s former beau, Theo. She isn’t even planning to attend until her maid Jenny convinces, telling her she looks too good to miss it. Edie, who seems remarkably unaware of her own charms, does agree, but for her the occasion is only saved by an encounter with her rebellious cousin, Rebecca.
Adams initiates a complex and layered tableau for the reader, and I was all in. Then she introduces us to another traumatized figure, Dr. Gideon Lawless, who suffers from a severe case of what we now know as PTSD. Hardly understood in 1921, Gideon suffers mightily from the syndrome, administering morphine as needed to get through what he thinks of as “fits.” Because he can no longer deal with the living, he now works in the county morgue, where he’s beginning to see a spate of cases involving murdered and mutilated young women.
The killer victimizes both the high society Shippen family (a revolutionary war Shippen was married to Benedict Arnold) and the Irish working-class Lawless family. Gideon is a widower, having lost his wife in childbirth, the one happy remnant of their marriage being his daughter Penny, who must live with her grandparents, as he is too overwhelmed to care for her himself. As you may imagine, Gideon and Edie’s paths happen to intersect as Edie, suffering as she watches her sister prepare to marry her ex, searches for a new and modern way forward in her own life. Adams has a good sense of pace and her plot and set up here are first rate. The Philly setting is refreshingly different from New York, though in the case of the Shippens, the blood is just as old and blue.
While this is a traditional mystery in many ways, in others it’s the product of our traumatic contemporary world. Even through the 2000s I think there was a fixity in novels, the assumption of a settled universe, the surface of which was only temporarily ruffled by crime, wide as its consequences may be. All that certainty has evaporated, and it seems to me that the works of younger writers tend more to reflect a perilous era of flux. The sense that resolving the crime restores harmony is absent as Edie and Gideon, both strong and admirable characters, are still painfully trying to discern their place in the universe as they work through myriad problems.
This is a terrific debut. I was captivated by both the story and the characters and raced through to the end, left with a desire to revisit both Edie and Gideon in the next installment. — Robin Agnew