{"id":4492,"date":"2022-07-09T06:27:06","date_gmt":"2022-07-09T13:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4492"},"modified":"2022-07-09T06:27:06","modified_gmt":"2022-07-09T13:27:06","slug":"nev-march-peril-at-the-exposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/nev-march-peril-at-the-exposition\/","title":{"rendered":"Nev March: Peril at the Exposition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I am a huge fan of Nev March\u2019s first book in this series, Murder in Old Bombay, <\/em>but I am a little sad she moved her main characters and newlyweds Jim Agnihotri and Diana Framji from Bombay to Boston.\u00a0 They are wonderful, vivid characters with an interesting relationship, and in many ways this is Diana\u2019s book, while the first book belonged to Jim.\u00a0 As the book opens Jim is letting Diana know that he\u2019s heading to Chicago on a job \u2013 he works for the Dupree detective agency \u2013 and that he\u2019ll be gone awhile.\u00a0 That\u2019s really all she knows.<\/p>\n

The weeks pass and Diana, lonely in her new city and very much missing her husband and worried about him, heads to his bosses to ask where he might be and just what she can do to find him.\u00a0 It appears he\u2019s disappeared completely, and Diana wrangles a job out of the Duprees (father and son), and heads to Chicago after cashing out her bank account and saying goodbye to the friends she\u2019s made in Boston.<\/p>\n

This is very much an immigrant\u2019s story from the inside out, as we follow Diana\u2019s journey.\u00a0 She\u2019s homesick, but longing to know just what it is Jim finds so appealing about America.\u00a0 She\u2019s startled by the racism she encounters.\u00a0 (It\u2019s 1893, but some things don\u2019t seem to have changed all that much.)\u00a0 She takes an African American man with her who works for the agency and encounters a woman on her travels who she hires as a companion, as it seems she knows her way around the city.<\/p>\n

The book takes place during the World\u2019s Fair and Chicago is filled with wonders as well as, apparently, unrest.\u00a0 March is excellent at setting the stage and the background of the fair is beautifully rendered and brought to life.\u00a0 So are the lively streets of Chicago.\u00a0 A friend has set her up in a lovely hotel, but the street encounters Diana has as she searches for Jim are a little less lovely.<\/p>\n

This is a complex book. It seems that anarchists may be attempting to place a bomb at the fair.\u00a0 Diana has a partial letter translated from German that indicates a serious number of explosives.\u00a0 As the book progresses, so does Diana\u2019s search, and Jim eventually appears.\u00a0 She has brought him danger unawares, but the two are an excellent team, balancing each other in many ways. March is a smart writer, and her complicated plot is a clever and satisfying one.<\/p>\n

I love Diana\u2019s bravery and smarts, and the way she and Jim are getting to know one another as husband and wife.\u00a0 The early passion of their romance is carrying through to a seemingly solid relationship.\u00a0 I love the way March writes about the very new America, still wet behind the ears, full of contradictions, violence, and unexpected kindness to strangers.\u00a0 I love her inclusion of surprising characters (especially for the time period) and I love the way she tells a mystery combined with romance and adventure.\u00a0 I am very much looking forward to seeing where Diana and Jim end up next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a huge fan of Nev March\u2019s first book in this series, Murder in Old Bombay, but I am a little sad she moved her main characters and newlyweds Jim Agnihotri and Diana Framji from Bombay to Boston.\u00a0 They are wonderful, vivid characters with an interesting relationship, and in many ways this is Diana\u2019s … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[865,863,10,100,448,862,864],"class_list":["post-4492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-captain-jim","tag-chicago-1893","tag-historical","tag-minotaur-books","tag-nev-march","tag-peril-at-the-exposition","tag-worlds-fair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4492"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4496,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4492\/revisions\/4496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}