Murder in Montparnasse: Phryne Fisher’s Murder Mysteries 12 (2012) is set in Paris, France, in 1918 and in Melbourne, Australia, in 1928.
Seven Australian soldiers are in Paris and unknowingly witness a murder. In 1928, in Australia, two of the seven men are dead: Tom MacKenzie drowned with black bruises on his shoulders and Alan Eeles died when his car fell on top of him as he was fixing it.
Bert, Cecil, and Johnnie contact the famous female private detective Miss Phryne Fisher because they fear that they may be next to die in suspicious circumstances. They worry too about William Gavin and Thomas Guilfoyle. They meet each year for a reunion.
They tell Phryne about Paris. Coincidentally, Phryne was in Paris, in Montparnasse, in 1928 on exactly the day of the murder: December 13. But she is a little distracted because her boyfriend, Lin Chung, is about to get married, and not to her.
Nevertheless, as she reads the coroner’s verdicts on the two deaths, she agrees that something is indeed odd.
Her mind goes back to Paris – the time of the Spanish influenza and the streets are eerily empty: ‘That was a long winter, colder than the grave.’ There was little food, except bread and sardines. She had caught the dreaded flu and was debilitated for three days.
She asked the remaining five men to recall Paris in 1918, after eleven months on the frontline of the war. The war was over and they were enjoying their freedom in the Montparnasse district: women, dance halls, an artist’s death, new friends, drunk times. And now Miss Fisher has to connect the present with the past.
This is an interesting crime novel from the Phryne Fisher series, combining the fashion, flair, and intrique from both ends of the globe in the post-war era of the 1920s.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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