Another book in Stephen Spotswood's Pentecost and Parker retro mystery series means another go-round with his surpassingly entertaining narrator, Willowjean "Will" Parker. True to form, Parker wisecracks and innuendos her way through Murder Crossed Her Mind, leading with what she calls her "brass ovaries," which are situated below a new anatomical development: her aching heart.
The fourth novel in the series, which includes Fortune Favors the Dead and Secrets Typed in Blood, begins in September 1947, as criminal-defense attorney Forest Whitsun visits Brooklyn's Pentecost Investigations, named for Parker's famous and formidable boss, Lillian Pentecost. Whitsun wants the detectives to find his friend Vera Bodine, an elderly shut-in: she's gone missing from her Manhattan apartment. Whitsun got to know Vera back when he worked at the law firm where she was a secretary valued for her uncanny memory--so uncanny that, as she confided to Whitsun, the FBI used her as a Nazi hunter during the war. Could this have something to do with her disappearance?
Pentecost has become increasingly limited by her multiple sclerosis, so Murder Crossed Her Mind finds Parker doing a lot of legwork while making characteristically piquant observations ("Alathea looked like the kind of secretary who was hired to work on her back") and pining for her geographically estranged lady love ("Can a heart have a charley horse?"). After Pentecost solves Spotswood's beautifully crafted puzzle, the novel concludes with a cliffhanger--as if readers needed an enticement to return for the next installment in this irresistible series. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer