By Dennis Fischman

I’ve been reading a lot of books set in the 1920’s lately. Some are true historical novels, even if they have a romance or adventure plot: I’m thinking of Salome of the Tenements by Anzia Yezierska and also a more recent book, The Double Standard Sporting House by local author Nancy Bernhard.

Some are mysteries set a hundred years ago. The four Nightingale Mysteries by Katharine Schellman fit that description. Another one, also from 1920’s NYC, is the Harlem Renaissance Mystery series by Nekesa Afia, starting with Dead Dead Girls.

“Dead Dead Girls” by Nekesia Afia. Berkley, 2021.

“If you want a jazz age murder mystery starring a tiny, tired lesbian, look no further than DEAD DEAD GIRLS,” the author says. Her protagonist, Louise Lloyd, is a young Black woman who grew up in a strict Christian household. Ten years before the story starts, she was one of the victims of a horrific kidnapper. Because she escaped and helped other girls escape, too, she has become known as “Harlem’s Hero.”

For all the good that does her!

When the story opens, Louise is waitressing in a café by day, and dancing in a speakeasy with her girlfriend, Rosa Maria, every night. They have a multiracial and mostly queer set of friends. Very few of them have two nickels to rub together, so it’s the bodies that do the rubbing.

Until the dead bodies start turning up. Not Louise’s friends, but a series of young Black women, a lot like her. A white police detective blackmails her into investigating in ways and places he could not, even though it means putting herself and her lover at risk.

What I liked best about the book was the way it evoked the atmosphere of 1920’s Harlem and laid out the characters of Louise Lovie Lloyd, her friends and lover, and her conflicted relations with her family. In an odd way, it resembles a cozy, although the number of deaths and other traumas in the story exceeds anything in the cozy mystery subgenre.

The mystery itself was about a serial killer (not my favorite subgenre), and the solution, the character of the killer, and the climactic scene all seemed unrealistic to me. The writing was passable. with some nods to the lingo of the time and place (which I enjoyed), but too many chapters ended on the equivalent of “Had I but known…”

All in all, a decent debut. If you like the characters and the setting, go ahead and read the next book in the series, Harlem Sunset.