Summer traveling, even if for a highly anticipated vacation, can be challenging, especially if flying is involved. So having an engrossing mystery novel to read can make for less stress. The following titles are all good choices.
Donna Leon's Venice-set mysteries, featuring the humane and experienced Commissario Guido Brunetti, are consistently riveting. Her latest, Falling in Love (Atlantic Monthly Press, $26), is no exception. Brunetti and his wife, Paola, daughter of a count and a socialist professor of English literature with a passion for Henry James, attend a performance of Tosca at La Fenice. The title role is sung by acclaimed soprano Flavia Pirelli, a lesbian who appeared in Leon's superb debut, Murder at La Fenice. Although Flavia is used to admirers, recently one seems to be showing her excessive, perhaps obsessive adulation. Is she being stalked? Is she in danger? A worried Brunetti enlists Paola's help. Her aristocratic connections may be critical in keeping Flavia from harm. No one captures the fascinating, frustrating, often corrupt, yet glorious Venetian ambiance like Leon does.
Venice in the 21st century may be dangerous, but it pales in comparison with late-19th-century London, an era Anne Perry has long made her own. Her newest, The Angel Court Affair (Ballantine, $27), shows the danger of challenging orthodoxies. When Spanish Sofia Delacruz begins preaching a gospel of forgiveness and love, she disturbs many people, including prominent society figures. Then she mysteriously disappears. Soon, two of her female assistants are found dead. Over the years, readers have watched the orphaned, lower-class, well-educated Thomas Pitt rise from Police Inspector to Commander, aided every step of the way by his upper-middle-class wife Charlotte, who once again gains entree into homes otherwise closed to law enforcement. Elegant, aristocratic Great Aunt Vespasia is back, using her caustic wit, keen intelligence, and impressive connections to help Pitt bring the criminals to justice.
Manhattan in 1930 was, for many residents, a wild island. The previous decade's legacy of liberated women and smoky, unfettered, alcohol-fueled nightlife, hadn't yet been driven underground by 1933's Volstead Act ("Prohibition"). In Ariel Lawton's witty The Wife, The Maid, and The Mistress (Anchor Press, $15.95), Judge Joseph Carter gets into a cab and disappears. Soon, his complicated life is exposed: his chic, proper wife Stella learns about his showgirl mistress Ritzi, who's determined to kick her way out of the chorus. His loyal, indebted maid Maria may know what happened to him and why. Set amidst jazz clubs and backstage dressing rooms, where anything goes.
Ed Ifkovoc's Final Curtain (Poison Pen Press, $14.95) takes place in New York a decade later, on the eve of America's entry into WWII. Novelist and playwright Edna Ferber decides to perform and takes the lead in a revival of the 1927 comedy she wrote with George S. Kaufman, The Royal Family, a satire about the Barrymores. During rehearsals in New Jersey, a handsome young actor, an understudy, is murdered. The suspects include the stage manager, an ingenue, an American Nazi with an obnoxious girlfriend, a stagehand named Dakota, his preacher mother and her very rich husband. Kaufman quips while Ferber thinks and investigates. Literate and amusing.
Show biz is also the setting for Beatrice Hitchman's Petite Mort (Serpent's Press, $14.95), about a 1913 silent movie believed to have been destroyed in a fire at Paris' Pathe Studios, before its director had seen the final print. Was it deliberate? The seemingly humble seamstress who worked on the costumes may have an answer. She doesn't plan on sewing for her living forever, not when she dreams of a dressing room of her own, and gorgeous finery to wear as well. Very evocative of the City of Light during the fading Belle Epoque on the eve of WWI.
Vienna in 1902 evokes images of a golden age. The capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was actually fraught with tension. The widower Emperor Franz Joseph's adored wife, Empress Elisabeth, had been assassinated in Venice just four years earlier. Their son, Crown Prince Rudolph, had committed suicide with his mistress at Mayerling in 1889. The new heir to the throne, the Emperor's nephew Francis Ferdinand, would be killed at Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists in 1914, triggering WWI. Adding to the social anxieties were the ideas of Sigmund Freud. In Frank Tallis' fascinating A Death in Vienna, set in 1902, Detective Oskar Rheinhardt and Dr. Max Libermann, an admirer of Freud, are determined to solve the brutal murder of a medium who some believe had connected with the unseen world, thereby frightening more than one person. The detective and the doctor may be an odd couple, but they work well together. Engrossing.