Free Love
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The time is 1920. The place is Greenwich Village, where food and wine are cheap, talk and ideas are rich, and love is free. This heady atmosphere has drawn actors, artists, and writers from all over who call the winding streets of the Village home. And it is here, amid the hot jazz and cool gin, that a free-spirited young poet finds her perfect milieu—and deadly danger...
FREE LOVE
Olivia Brown feels she has nothing left. Tragically, she has lost her fiancé in the Great War and her beloved guardian in the flu epidemic. Yet much to her surprise, her attorney informs her that she does, indeed, have something: an inherited brownstone on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village.
Her building is uninhabited except for one tenant, the strange, nocturnal man who has a lifelong lease on the ground-floor flat. He is, of all things, a private detective. In no time at all, Olivia is working cases with him, selling her sonnets to Vanity Fair, breaking hearts, and flaunting Prohibition at a speakeasy called Chumley's.
Then one evening after too many martinis, she literally trips over the body of a woman. Not only is the woman dead, but her face is shockingly familiar, for she bears an uncanny resemblance to Olivia Brown herself!
Thus begins a mystery that pits the girl from Bedford Street against a keen-witted killer. Her only hope is to somehow smoke out the murderer before everyone in the Village is lamenting the fate of the poet Olivia Brown—the one with so much promise, the one who died so young...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Olivia Brown, the heroine of this launch of a new series from the author of the Smith and Wetzon novels (The Big Killing, etc.), is the "it" girl of 1920s Greenwich Village. "Inspired," as the galley copy reads, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Olivia is cultivating a reputation as a bohemian poetess and a ravishing "good-time girl," with puppy-eyed artists and writers proposing marriage to her at every turn. But Olivia is staunch in her commitment to her heart and to her free-spirited lifestyle ("Stop, Edward. You know I love you, in my way. But it is I who would be morally dishonest if we stayed together"). Besides, she's preoccupied with discovering who among her devoted circle may be stalking her, and whether that stalker is responsible for murdering her "doppelg nger"--a transvestite made up to resemble Olivia, found in a soggy courtyard outside a popular speakeasy, his throat carefully slashed. When the police start asking Olivia impertinent questions, she turns to her tenant Harry Melville, a boozy PI with underworld connections and a limited vocabulary ("Bloody hell!"). Then Harry is attacked, presumably by the stalker, leaving the intrepid poet on her own to solve the apparently related crimes and to write her solipsistic, seemingly unironic poetry ("Abandon mind? There's no rebate/But death, who'll take us in mid-dance"). Meyers deftly evokes Prohibition Era Greenwich Village, a jittery, gin-soaked place infested with "romantic fever." But with its silly plot, interchangeable characters and pretentious dialogue, this series opener is as lightweight as the heroine's flapper physique.
