By Louise Hare

I have very mixed feelings about this book. The central mystery is fiendishly clever, slowly revealed with each chapter and interspersed with short narratives from the unnamed murderer, which tease the identity and motive. Having witnessed the murder by poison of her boss in a London nightclub, Miss Lena Aldridge jumps on the offer of a role in a Broadway musical, accompanied by a first class ticket on an ocean liner to New York. She is reluctantly pushed into companionship with a wealthy family shortly before the patriarch dies by poison, and (minor spoiler) she seems perfectly positioned to take the fall for it.

For much of the book, I was on the edge of my seat, since it seemed impossible that Lena would be able to extricate herself from such a clever trap, especially since, as the murderer describes her on the first page, “She may have possessed both common sense and ambition, but from what I’d learned about her, she rarely used the two together.”

As the book went on, I wasn’t that confident that Lena possessed much common sense, actually. She is sympathetic but not particularly likeable. She sort of drifts through life, drinking far too much, thinking of herself when she should be thinking of others, and thinking of others when she should be most concerned with herself. She is caught completely off guard by the end reveal, and unfortunately so was I, since it was a solution that I’d already dismissed as being both too obvious and nonsensical.

Basically, the end fell so flat that it soured the rest of the book for me. Because I’d been previously so engrossed in the events, the finale was even more of a disappointment. There were also themes of racism, colorism, sexism, and classism woven throughout, but they became so heavy handed in the ending that they reminded me of, not even freshman 101 classes, but the dorm discussions in afterhours that we thought were so deep. Perhaps I’m just getting jaded as I get older.