Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River

The screwball comedy meets the drawing-room mystery in Emily J. Edwards's Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River, the charming follow-up, set in 1950, to Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man. For girl Friday-turned-private detective Viviana's first case as Tommy Fortuna's full partner, the New York City gumshoes head upstate to mingle with the houseguests of Buster Beacon, a wealthy scientist: Buster has hired the detectives to investigate the strange noises--"woo-woo creaks and ghastly sounds"--coming from somewhere on his property. Upon hearing a noise in the night, Viviana and Tommy search a Clue board's worth of rooms, only to determine that they heard sozzled guest Chester Courtland falling out of bed--or was he slipped a mickey? While checking Courtland's pockets, Viviana and Tommy discover that the man is with the FBI. He doesn't live to see his job through.

As Viviana evaluates the "household full of silver-spoon charlatans," her tough-dame narration goes down as easy as a malted from the neighborhood diner. Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River, bedazzled with period details, offers occasional sobering moments by way of reminders that many of the novel's men (Tommy among them) carry traces of their war service. Edwards packs in the genre nods: horror, sci-fi, espionage, ghost story, and romance via Viviana and Tommy's flirtatious repartee. Another nod: Viviana's discovery of a secret passageway in Buster's house recalls something out of Nancy Drew, although the crime at the novel's center would have been well beyond the girl sleuth's scope. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

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