Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty) braids together the sensuous underworld of the 1920s speakeasies, the glamour of the Ziegfeld Follies and a sense of evil greater than Prohibition-era police corruption in her edge-of-the-seat new series.
She creates a 17-year-old heroine as complex as her previous series heroine, Gemma Doyle. Evangeline O'Neill has a sense of entitlement that masks deep sorrow and an intelligence that often goes unappreciated in a male-dominated society. Gemma's tragedy was the death of her mother; Evie's is the death of her brother, James, in the Great War. Evie wears a half-dollar he sent to her for her ninth birthday as a pendant.
Evie brings shame upon her family when she gets tipsy at a soiree and performs a naughty party trick. Her mother is secretary of the Women's Temperance Society, and the trick involved holding and "reading" Harold Brodie's class ring and announcing that he'd knocked up a chambermaid. Evie's father owes his car dealership business to Harold's dad, and wealthy Norma Wallingford, to whom Harold is "engaged-to-be-engaged," threatens to break up with him. Evie's parents send her from Zenith, Ohio, to New York City to board with her Uncle Will until things cool down. But this is no punishment. Evie's thrilled to leave her small town for the lights and excitement of Manhattan. Evie's uncle runs the financially troubled Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, called the "Museum of the Creepy Crawlies" by native New Yorkers. Evie learns her first lesson upon her arrival at Pennsylvania Station, when smooth-talking young Sam Lloyd lifts a $20 bill from her coat pocket. That's a lot of money in 1926. And that's not the last Evie will see of Sam.
Bray's seductive cast of characters features Theta Knight, the Ziegfeld beauty who falls in love with Memphis Campbell, a Harlem numbers runner and poet with a secret gift; and Jericho Jones, Uncle Will's mysterious assistant, who's also the secret crush of Evie's longtime pen pal, the sweetly naïve Mabel Rose. Bray uses a third-person narrative that shifts among their points of view. Spotlights briefly pause on the Proctor sisters, Blind Bill Johnson and Sister Margaret Walker, all of whom have a connection to a cryptic "coming storm."
A string of mysterious murders casts a pall over Evie's glittering prospects. A strange symbol branded onto each of the victims prompts the detective in charge to draft Uncle Will into the investigation, and Evie uses this as a way to ramp up attendance at the museum, to get it out of arrears and ensure she can stay. But her gift for reading objects reveals dark supernatural forces linked to a half-century-old prophecy. If what she's uncovering turns out to be true, they have only weeks to solve the puzzle and destroy the murderer or evil will reign on earth.
Bray's writing is at her spinetingling best here (e.g., "Blackened gravestones tilted like crooked teeth in a rotting mouth"). The book is thick, but the pages fly, and Bray leaves hints of a "coming storm" to lure readers back for the next installment--along with the question of whether Evie will get to remain in Manhattan and, if she does, which of her love interests will come to fruition. With romance, mystery, glamour and history as bait, Libba Bray is sure to hook new readers as well as welcome back her legion Gemma Doyle series fans. --Jennifer M. Brown
Shelf Talker: Libba Bray returns with a complex heroine to rival her own Gemma Doyle, and a string of murders that only Evie, with her talents as a Diviner, can solve--if she doesn't become a victim first.