The hub of Libby Cudmore's debut hipster crime novel, The Big Rewind (wink to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep), is a mixtape misdelivered to her protagonist, Jett Bennett. Jett is a temp proofreader for a private investigator and a freelance music reviewer living in a rent-stabilized Brooklyn apartment "just east of Williamsburg and, judging by how people dressed, slightly beyond Thunderdome." When she attempts to give the tape to its rightful recipient, she finds her neighbor KitKat bludgeoned to death by a rolling pin in her kitchen (another wink, this time to Clue). In her "decent brunch outfit--a black pleated cheerleader skirt, vintage plaid double-breasted jacket, fourteen-eyelet Doc Martens with rose-print knee socks poking out like I was an extra from Clueless," Jett sets out to knock on doors and buttonhole KitKat's friends on a music-laden journey to find the killer.
Working through the mixtape's "soundtrack for mutually broken hearts," Jett narrows her search to KitKat's secret married lover and former professor, whom Jett meets in a bar like "a Tom Waits song come to life; cramped and dimly lit with rickety tables, dirty mirrors, a pull-knob cigarette machine, and a jukebox with Elvis Costello and the Smiths." Jett doesn't put the clues together until the end, but along the way, The Big Rewind is an entertaining puzzler played to the beat of musical youth. As one character reflects, "I'm so old I remember when Green Day was a punk band and not a Broadway show." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.