AUTHOR: Stefanie Pintoff
I enjoyed this historical mystery, just not as much as I wanted to. The mystery,, itself, was fine. The narrator, a NYC police detective now working with a police force just north of the big city, catches a case involving a brutal murder of a young woman that brings him back to his old haunting grounds, as well as having him cross paths with a criminologist, Alastair Sinclair, who wants to assist in the investigation.
Det. Simon Ziele lost his fiancee in the 1904 General Slocum ferry disaster and is still dealing with his grief a year later. Sinclair believes the criminal he's been studying with his research staff at Columbia University is the killer Ziele is hunting. Of course, nothing is ever that easy, and this book didn't win its author an Edgar Award for nothing. With Ziele revealing as much of the story as the reader needs to know at any point, the likely culprit seems to change whenever new info is uncovered. I wasn't correct in all my suppositions -- I entertained far more possible resolutions to the killing than the author did -- but the solution to the case wasn't much of a surprise. I also liked the characters. But Pintoff's prose is matter-of-fact simple and doesn't evoke the time and place as well as other historical mystery writers have done. It is a fast read, however, and I have the next two on their way to me.
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