By Dennis Fischman

The time is 1942, in the midst of the Second World War. The place: the Big Apple. A former circus hand with knife-throwing skills saves the life of a private detective. The two promptly become a team. The detective is gradually weakening from MS and needs a scrappy helper to go out and spend time and shoe leather investigating scenes and interviewing people. The former circus hand needs a job.

This is a delightfully twisty-turny historical noir, with homages to Rex Stout and his Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin pairing. It also makes deft use of gender reversal: the gumshoe who falls in love with a femme fatale, and her intellectual boss, are all women.

“Fortune Favors the Dead” by Stephen Spotswood, Doubleday, 2020.

Willowjean (“Will”) Parker gets hired by wealthy Lillian Pentecost, and in between cases, she runs self-defense classes for women, often women facing abuse and domestic violence. Lillian heads the agency. Because she doesn’t need the money, she can take on cases for free when the client needs their services but cannot pay. That creates a network of people who are grateful to them and can give them information when they need it.

In this first book of the series, Pentecost & Parker take on what seems to be a classic locked room mystery. The wife of a steel magnate (and war profiteer), Abigail Collins, is found dead at her annual Halloween party. Her husband, Alistair, had committed suicide in the same room, a year earlier. Is his spirit walking on the eve of the Day of the Dead, and is her death a supernatural occurrence?

Or is it all too human, and which of the suspects committed the crime: their children, Randolph and Becca (who sets Will’s pulses racing), or their godfather, Harry Wallace … or even the mysterious fortune teller, Ariel Belestrade (who has a history with Lillian Pentecost that’s yet to be entirely revealed)?

Delightfully, many of the characters (conveniently listed and blurbed in the front of the book, Lindsey Davis-style, are not who they seem to be, and their relationships with other characters are not what they appear to be either. I look forward to reading more of this series.