One True Sentence
Craig McDonald
Minotaur, Feb 15 2011, $25.99
ISBN 9780312554385
In 1924 in Paris, a serial killer targets the editors of small literary magazines. The culprit’s M.O. is never the same with each murder more gruesome than any of the previous ones. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas order mystery writers and potential lovers Hector Lassiter and Brinke Devlin to solve the case before someone else dies.
The pair finds clues that point towards Ernest Hemingway. However, the writing sleuths believe that is too simple of a solution for a clever predator so they assume it is a set-up. They make further inquiries that lead to occultist Crowley and a Satanist, but nothing quite comes together as time seems to have run out on Lassiter after a brothel bloodbath.
The latest Lassiter 19202 mystery (see Print the Legend) contains more twists than Lombard Street in San Francisco, but all that spinning makes for a difficult to follow the somewhat non-cohesive story line. Still this is an enjoyable historical amateur sleuth as readers meet a who’s who to include Hemingway as well as the two grand dame authoresses ordering Lassiter, Devlin and other crime novelists to find the killer before someone else fall off the Left Banke dead.
Harriet Klausner
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