The Four Queens of Crime

December 1, 2024

Filmmaker Limoncelli makes her fiction debut with a historical mystery. In 1938, DCI Lilian Wyles from Scotland Yard enlists mystery writers Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham to help solve the murder of Sir Henry Heathcote, who has been found dead in the library of Hursley House after a fundraising gala. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 6, 2025
Limoncelli makes a splash with her riotously entertaining debut, which imagines real-life crime writers Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham teaming up to solve a murder in 1938. At the outset, the women, all friends, have agreed to host a fundraising gala for the Women’s Voluntary Service as fears rise that Nazi aggression might lead to war. The party is to be held at Hursley House, the country residence of former Conservative MP Sir Henry Heathcote. The festivities turn sour, however, when Heathcote is found dead in his library with a stunned expression on his face. Lilian Wyles, the real-life first female DCI at Scotland Yard, is assigned to the investigation, and she leans on the macabre expertise of Christie and her cohorts to help crack the case. Limoncelli delivers both a shrewd whodunit and an insightful look at the lives and careers of her heroines, with fizzy conversations about each woman’s writing style seamlessly woven into their crime-solving. The result is a note-perfect Golden Age pastiche with a satisfying metafictional twist. Agent: Murray Weiss, Catalyst Literary.

January 15, 2025
As World War II looms, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham headline a fundraiser in an aristocratic manse that promptly turns into a murder scene. The morning after the four bestselling authors--who, along with Baroness Emma Orczy, coincidentally starred in Marie Benedict'sThe Queens of Crime just last month--join ranks to raise money for real-life activist Lady Stella Reading's Women's Voluntary Service, their host, ex-MP Sir Henry Heathcote of Hursley House, smokes his last cigar, which someone's dipped in cyanide. Since the baronet's idea of supporting his native land's values includes looking down his nose at Communists, Blacks, Jews, and women, the assembled party is full of people who, as one of them acknowledges, "won't mind very much that he's dead." But it could well be that members of Sir Henry's immediate family--from his son, Charles, now the 12th baronet, to his daughter, Kate, come home from boarding school, to his fiancee, Lady Sarah--had the best reasons of all to kill him. Although real-life DCI Lilian Wyles of Scotland Yard is eager to enlist the help of the Queens of Crime, fictional DCI Richard Davidson, her partner on the case, won't hear of it, and the pair's dutiful, endless interrogations of Sir Henry's family and staff shunt Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham to the sidelines, where they remain chatting among themselves to the very end; their detection is pretty much limited to elucidating a single clue that baffles the Scotland Yard sleuths. Bonus: Readers can congratulate themselves on having the enlightened social attitudes the victim and suspects sorely lack.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.