A Good Knife’s Work
Beautiful screenwriter Lauren Atwill is on the lam from LA. Grabbing her PI bodyguard, she heads for the anonymity of New York City, hoping to write for a popular radio show, only to find the show’s producer brutally murdered in her office. To get the answers to what must be an inside job, Lauren goes undercover, getting herself hired as a fledgling writer. She soon uncovers plenty of secrets, but one keeps eluding her. How did the killer get in and out of the locked offices?
Posing a variation of the classic ‘locked room’ dilemma, Ms. York provides, by the novel’s end, a clever and satisfying solution. The problem is the in-between, comprising seemingly endless interviews of a cast amounting to well over twenty-five characters. This reduces the pace to something more suitable to a Shakespeare play than a smart radio drama of the late ’40s. And as the clues slowly pile up, one wonders, why does Lauren care? We never quite seem to get to know the lovely lady.
But if it’s the mystery itself rather than the characters that move you, this one is for you.
