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MURDER IN MONTPARNASSE
by Kerry Greenwood
Poisoned Pen Press, March 2006
266 pages
$14.95
ISBN: 1590582772


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The Hon Phryne Fisher is young, rich, outrageous, and Australian. Those who might imagine the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda in the 1920s as a fairly dreary bastion of white Protestant rectitude imagine it without Phryne. She dresses spectacularly, is an outspoken feminist, has nerves of steel, leads an independent existence, and, startling for the time and place, lives quite openly with Lin Chung, her Chinese lover who is about to marry a young woman from his homeland.

This last circumstance is too much for her butler, Mr Butler, who gives his notice on the grounds that while fornication is none of his business, adultery is a serious threat to his reputation. Since Mr Butler is wed to that excellent cook, Mrs B, Phryne's household seems on the verge of dissolution.

But she has other, even more serious problems to occupy her attention. The young fiancee of a middle-aged French chef who runs the only decent restaurant in St Kilda has disappeared. He wants to know why and engages Phryne (who, among her other accomplishments, is a successful private detective) to find out.

Simultaneously, some ex-Army mates, whom Phryne met when an improbably young ambulance driver at the Front in the Great War, are troubled at the unexpected deaths of two of their old buddies and ask Phryne to look into the 'accidents' that carried them off.

This last undertaking thrusts Phryne back in memory to that troubled time immediately after the War when she was an artist's model in Montparnasse, madly in love with an unworthy, even dangerous man, and eventually given refuge by the circle surrounding Natalie Barney, the American heiress who presided over a remarkable Sapphic salon on Rue Jacob in Paris.

Greenwood provides an invaluable service by prefacing most of her chapters with quotations from Barney, who is now a sadly neglected figure. But that was all ten years ago and now Phryne's ex-lover has perhaps surfaced in Australia and may pose a continuing menace, if not to her physical, then certainly to her psychic well-being.

Although this is evidently the 12th in the Phryne Fisher series, it is the first to be published in the United States, although COCAINE BLUES (1989), the first in the series, has just been published by Poisoned Pen. Nevertheless, it is as good a place to start as any. It takes the reader back to Phryne's origins, and though some narrative details are a bit obscure because we lack the earlier entries in the series, things are clear enough.

Phryne is a fantasy figure, of course, a kind of grown-up Nancy Drew without Nancy's deadly earnestness and sterling morality. She dresses better, too. It's hard to imagine a better way to while away a couple of leisure hours than in her glittery, fantasy presence.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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