A Lethal Lady

May 15, 2024
A woman of the Harlem Renaissance uses detecting skills she's honed back home to solve a baffling murder in Paris. After 10 months in the City of Lights, Louise Lloyd has settled into a stimulating routine: working at the parfumerie Allaire's by day, hanging out with a group of artists at Le Chat Noir in the early evening, and dancing ecstatically until closing time at Aquarius. Her neighbor is the prickly playwright Ciar�n Dunne. Refreshingly, Louise encounters far less racism in Paris than in New York. Still, she misses her beloved Zodiac in Harlem, the site of two previous sleuthing adventures. News of her triumphs has apparently crossed the ocean, because when talented painter Iris Wright, a "temperamental" member of the Le Chat Noir group, goes missing, her sister appeals to Louise to investigate, an offer she can't resist. Her eagerness to solve the mystery is amped up when she meets Iris' husband, Philip, an elitist jerk. Afia's ebullient portrait of 1928 Paris is highly entertaining, but the novel is stuffed with characters and subplots that threaten to swamp the mystery. Besides separate, albeit sometimes overlapping, groups of characters at the parfumerie, Le Chat Noir, and the Aquarius, there are intermittent letters from Harlem updating Louise on the lives of her friends Rosa Maria and Rafael. Louise's interest in photography puts her in touch with a group of female artists, and she still manages to solve the mystery. Whew! A busy, bubbly Jazz Age romp capped by a mystery.

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May 13, 2024
At the start of Afia's underwhelming third mystery starring Black lesbian detective Louise Lloyd (after Harlem Sunset), it's the spring of 1928 and Louise has decamped from Harlem to Paris, where she spends her days clerking in a parfumerie and her nights drinking and dancing. Things take a turn after up-and-coming artist Iris Wright disappears and her mother approaches Louise with a letter of recommendation from a friend back in Harlem and begs her to come out of retirement. Reluctantly, Louise agrees, plunging into the shadowy world of La Mort de Artistes, a secret society of women artists to which Iris belonged. As Louise infiltrates their ranks, she grows frightened of Iris's ruthless milieu, and leans on her circle of glamorous writers and musicians—and her two love interests—for help solving the case. Afia conjures a suitably intoxicating atmosphere, but her plotting drags, and the final reveal is a letdown. In letters to Louise, her friends praise her as “brave,” “brilliant,” and “formidable,” but little on the page bears out such qualities of her character. This disappoints. Agent: Travis Pennington, Knight Agency.

July 19, 2024
Louise Lloyd, who as a teen in Harlem saved friends' lives and, in two cases years later, brought killers to justice, has moved to Paris, still seeking to live down her status as a heroine. Working in a parfumerie by day, she dances the night away in the lively clubs of late 1920s Paris, especially one for artists. One night, the name Iris Wright comes up. Iris is also an American expat, but married and well-to-do. She is a painter, due to have a show open in a gallery, but no one has seen her for days. A few days later a woman comes to the parfumerie with a letter of introduction from Louise's New York friends and a request: find Iris, her daughter. At first, Louise fights the request, but ultimately pursues a search. She ingratiates herself into a circle of Iris' friends posing as a photographer, finding herself uncomfortable in their rarefied world, but also getting closer to the truth about Iris. This is the third Harlem Renaissance mystery (after Harlem Sunset, 2022), and readers will be delighted to follow Louise's adventures in Paris.

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