Phryne Fisher is doing one of her favorite things – dancing to the music of Tintagel Stone’s Jazzmakers at the Green Mill, Melbourne’s premier dance hall. And she’s wearing a sparkling lobelia-colored georgette dress. Nothing can flap the unflappable Phryne – especially on a dance floor with so many delectable partners. Nothing but death, that is. The dance competition is trailing into its last … its last hours when suddenly a figure slumps to the ground. Phryne, conscious of how narrowly the weapon missed her own bare shoulder, back, and dress, investigates.
Phryne follows the deadly trail into the dark smoky jazz clubs of Fitzroy, into the arms of eloquent strangers, and finally into the sky, as she uncovers a complicated family tragedy from the Great War and the damaged men who came back from ANZAC cove.
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This adventure of Phryne’s has a moral ambiguity about it that’s very reminiscent of noir. And the final few lines are wonderfully done! Give me chills. This particular mystery’s characters are very different from the TV episode counterparts. So even though the mystery in some respects is the same, you’re left caught up in the characters and their selfish motivations and strange qualities. Phryne is hired to find the two very different sons of Mrs. Freeman, and while she’s at it, she figures out the murder that she witnessed before Charles Freeman disappeared, and goes on an incredibly flying adventure to find the other Freeman brother. We get some characters from Flying Too High making a short reappearance to help Phryne with planning for her flight across the Australian Alps, which is fun. There’s not much of Dot and the others in this particular book, though we do end up learning a lot more about Bert and Cec, as Phryne asks them about their experience in the War. Over all, this book does feel a bit more noir than the previous novels, so if you’re looking for clear-cut good-and-bad division of people, you won’t find much of that here. Everyone’s kind of a little bad for the most part here.
I first came in contact with Miss Phryne through the tv series. I don’t know why, I had a feeling it was going to be a silly show, but since it’s the 1920s and since it’s a mystery, I decided to give it a go. I fell in love.
So when I got the chance to read one of the books through NetGalley, I immediately grabbed it. Once again, I was initially put off (it wasn’t the first book in the series, and at the beginning, I had a hard time getting into it), but then a fell in love all over again.
There is really a lot to love about this series. First of all, Miss Phryne Fisher is a fantastic character: haughty and elegant, but also good-hearted and generous. Smart, educated, self-confident, but also insecure enough to make her not really a superhero.
The cast of characters around her is equally endearing, very easy to love all of them in their own way. This was a huge winning point for me.
The era reconstruction is absolutely outstanding, one of the best I’ve read. It is plain clear this author did a lot of research and – this is the tricky part – integrated them into the story seamlessly. Greenwood’s 1920s world is vivid, real, and still different enough that you know it is not the world we’re living now. Still, she depicts it in such natural tones you can’t help feel you’re there.
The mystery was clever and well constructed as well as the investigation. I even like the romantic parenthesis Phryne takes at some point, though that went on for a little bit too long for me (but hey, I’m not particularly fond of romances, so…). I really liked the connection with WWI, which – like all the rest – was integrated beautifully in the story.
It’s a great series. Read it!