The world of crime fiction has a marvelous new misanthrope: Agatha Dorn, who narrates Tom Spencer's soot-black comedy of a first novel, The Mystery of the Crooked Man, a top-notch tale of blackmail, corporate greed, and extreme grammar policing.
Agatha, an assistant curator at London's Neele Archive, is equally hard charging with her grammar rules and her alcohol consumption. Things are looking up for Agatha when, while rooting around in the archive, she unearths a draft of an unpublished novella by Gladden Green, a foremost golden-age mystery writer. Agatha smells an opportunity: she informs Green's grandson, chairman of Gladden Green, Ltd., that she'll shred the novella if he doesn't give her a cut of the royalties when the book is published. He acquiesces, but everything else goes wonky for Agatha, what with the fallout from her ex-girlfriend's suicide, Agatha's boss's unexplained disappearance, an avaricious company's stepped-up effort to gobble up the Neele Archive's land, and her niggling doubt regarding the Green manuscript's authenticity.
That Agatha feels forced to play detective is delicious given her lack of respect for the mystery genre--Green's novella, she will have it known, "wasn't literature, of course." But a protagonist's hilariously extravagant condescension can take a crime novel only so far; happily, Spencer has carefully mapped out his old-school-style mystery, capping it off with a gobsmacking twist. Readers would do well to pick up the brainily escapist The Mystery of the Crooked Man, Agatha's opinion that "relaxation is not a legitimate reason to read a novel" notwithstanding. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer