Murder Me Now
This is Meyers’ second mystery featuring Olivia Brown, a Greenwich Village poet in Prohibition 1920s. A nanny is murdered during a country house party. Olivia, assisting her downstairs tenant, Harry, a private investigator, discovers that she wasn’t a nanny at all but a Pinkerton detective, and suspicion falls on all the guests of the party. Meyers does a wonderful job of recreating the bohemian atmosphere of the Village in the twenties. Liquor flows from the bootleggers and into teacups in speakeasies. Edmund “Bunny” Wilson, writing for Vanity Fair at the time, is a character. Olivia’s first mystery was Free Love, a sentiment she heartily endorses, having, as the book opens, a college professor lover, never quite dropping him but flirting with a lesbian photojournalist and then taking up with a novelist. Who she is with at the moment seems to depend on where the plot is to go rather than attraction, and some plot lines are dropped without resolution. Still, the backdrop of 1920s New York is irresistible and Meyers weaves in fictional and factual characters fairly seamlessly. Recommended.
