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Miranda Corbie, escort turned private eye in 1940's San Francisco, stars in Kelli Stanley's CITY OF GHOSTS. This is her third appearance in what may be called Stanley's “City of…” series, and she has lost none of her toughness or raw edge. Shades of Sam Spade here, as Miranda negotiates a dark world of thieves and murderers at a time when Europe is falling to the Germans but the U. S. is not involved yet and nothing seems certain. No wonder then that she is pulled into secretly observing a possible Nazi spy, a chemistry professor named Dr. Huntington Jasper whom the feds suspect of passing along information to the Germans. Cigarette haze surrounds the action, and Miranda goes back and forth between a smoke and a butter rum Life Saver.
Dangerous undercover work is not the sort of job that Miranda is used to. When we first see her, she is busy finding stolen jewels and returning them to Lois Hart, a disdainful socialite who has hired her for this purpose. Miranda agrees to take on the clandestine activity because the federal agent, James MacLeod - a man with whom she clearly has some sort of work history - offers her a deal she cannot refuse: a ticket to England to search for her long lost mother who is possibly trapped there. Miranda returns the jewels she has retrieved to Hart, but the wealthy woman is found dead in Miranda's office building the next morning with Miranda's receipt in her purse. Miranda talks the police out of considering her a suspect, and later attends a masked ball given by the local Germans/Nazis. She has discovered that Jasper frequently travels outside the country and often returns with what was called "degenerate art" by the Nazis. This designation was a label for most of what we might call modern art, including artists such as Picasso. The art connection becomes her way of getting close to him, as she disguises herself as a buyer of art and manages an introduction at the ball.
Miranda has men in her life, but treats them poorly. Her painful history, which includes witnessing horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the death of a lover, may be a reason for her attitude and actions. We learn about what has happened to her and her troubled past only in brief, tantalizing flashbacks. Although she hides it well, she does seem to have a soft spot for Rick Sanders, a newspaper reporter who helps her find out the truth about her mother. A man she considers a friend, Edmund Whittaker, who is gay at a time when that was not acceptable, becomes the second murder victim in the mystery, adding to Miranda's sense of being alone. Twists and turns abound throughout this book and by the end, what both the reader and Miranda believed to be true is shown to be nothing more than illusions, ghosts.
Kelli Stanley has a unique writing style that seems to mimic the clipped personality of her protagonist. Her choppy sentences and flashes of description seem almost cinematic, and one can imagine this book as a film played out on the page. This kind of writing may not appeal to everyone, but Stanley does it well and her style helps to pull the reader into Miranda's staccato world.
Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.
Reviewed by Anne Corey, October 2014
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