Murder in Williamstown (Phryne Fisher Mysteries, 22)
Flapper Phryne Fisher makes her twenty-second outing in this book, which ends with the winds of economic collapse blowing in from offshore. Opium smuggling, Melbourne’s Chinese community, and the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind play their part in interwoven plot and subplot.
Hoping to give sleuthing work to all the multiple secondary characters Miss Fisher’s household has accumulated over the years, the book diffuses somewhat so that no storyline is as interesting and intricate as it could be, but fans of the TV series and movie will not complain. Greenwood’s voice bubbles like champagne: take, for example, the description of the out-of-tune piano in chapter one, the piano inmates from the Blind Institute will have to remedy. My great-grandfather was a blind piano tuner, and the well-researched notes about the institute and the life of its inmates ring true.
We are never bogged down with the descriptions of food we would love if calories never interfered, clothes that would fit just elegantly yet scandalously so above the knee, drink that would never make us stupid, and lovers we could first attract and then still have with no fear of pregnancy or disease… And all in Australia, too.
