Murder on Madison Square (Gaslight Mystery #25) by Victoria Thompson

  

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: A couple of young teen girls are taken advantage of, but nothing happens on page.

 

Former policeman Frank Malloy is frustrated when a woman requests his private detective services to implicate her wealthy husband in adultery, the only legal grounds for divorce in New York state. Although Mrs. Bing seems genuinely distressed about her marriage and desperate to end it, she refuses to tell Frank the reason she absolutely must divorce her husband and admits she has no legal grounds. Frank explains he won't manufacture evidence for her and sends her on her way.

The following week, Frank and Sarah happen to be attending the first ever auto show in Madison Square Garden when they meet the woman's husband, Alfred Bing, who has invested in a company that produces one of the electric motorcars on display. A few days later, the newspapers report that millionaire Alvin Bing has been found dead, pinned beneath one of the wheels of his very own motorcar. But who was driving it? The obvious suspect is Mrs. Bing, but Frank and Sarah find that nothing is as it seems in their puzzling, dangerous search for truth.

 

I've had this book for a long time and for some reason kept overlooking it. I have to say, it was nice being back with Sarah, Frank, Gino, and Maeve. I enjoy these characters, even though the overarching plot involving their personal lives, moves at a snails pace. 

As I've said many times about this series, the mysteries are too easy to figure out, and this book was the same. It was glaringly obvious what was going on, right from the beginning. This, as usual, ended up making our investigators look rather stupid and naive. Maybe the naivete came from this sort of stuff not being talked about much during this time period. I'm not sure, but I feel like they are not in Victorian times, so should have been a bit more informed. After all, at this point they've seen a lot already. Surprisingly, even though it reads as light mystery, this series has touched on some pretty dark subject matter at times.

Despite this constant annoyance about this series, I still keep coming back because I like the characters, and I like the historic details that are included. This time, the history of automobiles, and specifically electric cars are featured here. Frank bought an automobile a couple of books ago, and they go to a car show at Madison Square Garden in this book, because Gino is a car enthusiast. The book showed how ladies preferred electric cars because they were easier to start up. Cars with internal combustion engines had to be cranked, and took a bit of muscle. It also showed why electric cars weren't practical for everyone (partly because of the need to charge them, and partly because of the high price) and why they eventually died out. It was also interesting that there were way more cars being made than people buying them because they were still too expensive for most people to afford them.

 

Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for providing me with an ARC of this book.