Seventh in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series.
Phryne is a young, beautiful, intelligent, rich, socially
acceptable lady living in Melbourne in the 1920s, who amelioriates her
occasional boredom by working as a private detective.
As in The Green Mill Murder, there are two major plots going on
here, but they're more neatly separated into primary and secondary
than that volume managed. Two actors in a production of Ruddigore
are poisoned, one of them fatally, and this is regarded as the latest
manifestation of the ghost that's haunting the company; and Phryne
helps break up a street fight among the Chinese population of
Melbourne, and gets superficially involved in that community.
The occasional preachiness continues: this time it's mostly in the
secondary plot and against racism, though homophobia gets a look-in
too. I suppose it's inevitable that a period story written to appeal
to modern readers must give its protagonist a modern attitude, but I'm
not convinced that such heavy-handed lectures are useful or welcome to
any reader.
The main mystery is pleasingly arranged, with deep hooks into the lore
of Gilbert and Sullivan that was clearly a major part of the research
for the book. It does sometimes feel a bit synthetic, but that's
somewhat deliberate: a baby mislaid at birth and recognised by
birthmark is a suitably Gilbertian plot. (Though, for the
hard-of-thinking reader, Greenwood has her characters point out that
it is, which is a bit of a shame. They do otherwise manage to play
things straight, though.)
Where this series shines is in its secondary characters; some of them
are stereotypes, such as here the beautiful but dim lead actress, but
mostly they're plausible real people of the era and place.
Probably not a good place to start the series. Followed by Urn Burial.
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