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Central to events on the liner is the wealthy Abernathy family who Lena meets on the first night on board the luxury ship. Readers become familiar with the main secondary characters overs time through conversations and actions. Lena Aldridge is a singer in a seedy London jazz club where the owner has just been murdered right under her nose and said club owner just happens to be the husband of her best friend Maggie. I have a confession to make: the actual mystery in mystery novels is usually not very interesting to me. Instead, she's stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho, and her married lover has just left her.
Set in the 1930s, its the story of Lena Alridge, a mixed race Jazz singer in her 20s working in a seedy little club in Soho London. Eliza is Frank’s daughter, rather aloof at first and seemingly unaware that her husband is seducing Frank’s assistant Daisy when no one is looking. Anyone could travel on the Queen Mary, they said, and that was true enough as long as you knew the rules.
One of the other characters even says of the narrator who should be dead of liver failure that sure, he drinks, but he’s not an alcoholic. Accompanying her is Charlie Bacon, the self-appointed promoter, who has promised her a role in a Broadway show due to the connections of her deceased father. Eat peppermint creams from one of those fancy boxes with the tissue paper while sipping champagne that my steward would fetch whenever I rang the bell. Both the mystery on land that the one at sea were so boring and obvious, and the characters did not help make them interesting at all. When a stranger offers her a starring role on Broadways and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary, she ends up accepting it, despite knowing very little about the opportunity or the people.
We meet her first as she embarks on her voyage across the Atlantic with a theatre producers assistant, strangely named Charlie Bacon. Lena who is resilient, determined, doing her best to survive in jungle as a mixed race, penniless, hungry, ambitious girl with pure talent.Luckily Charlie Bacon: ex police officer, look alike Clark Gable with strange last name appears out of nowhere at the right name in the right place, making her an offer she cannot reject. The setting aboard the Queen Mary is excellent and there is a real clarity conveyed in the differences between those in the luxury of the upper decks and those below. The reader can already have her detective hat on, especially as flashbacks reveal more about what Lena is running from in London. I took a bite and then swallowed the rest whole, swilling it down with the last of my drink to get rid of the taste of stale socks.
But Lena has always had a complicated life, one shrouded in mystery as a mixed-race girl passing for white in a city unforgiving of her true racial heritage.The killer pretty much just explains it all and then doesn't even get held to account for the killing or framing of Lena. This is a mix of knowing she isn’t of the same class, perhaps opting to gravitate towards Daisy and Dr. During her journey, she finds herself at the same table within Abernathy family: ultra rich, sophisticated and also very dysfunctional family: each of them keeps terrible secrets and one of them is a killer who plans to put blame on Lena for his/ her own misdemeanors. The dynamics in this book take on quite a few different directions, which include morality, alcohol and drugs, racism, class distinction, the unfairness that some women face and much more. She's feeling utterly hopeless until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York.
A brilliant murder mystery, it also explores class, race and pre-WWII politics, and will leave readers reeling from the beauty and power of it. Super cinematic and every bit as Agatha Christie-esque as its sounds… ifyou like murder mysteries, pick this one up! The vast bulk of the story takes place on the cruise liner as Lena gets involved with a very rich family and secrets are revealed as well as murders! Throw in a Jazz Age ocean crossing on the Queen Mary and series of diabolical murders that would make Agatha Christie proud, and I was done for, turning the pages late into the night. I liked that the second murder happened on the ship, in the middle of the ocean, with no place to escape, so we knew the murderer had to be on board the ship.Postage charges vary according to the weight of your items and the destination country, and are calculated at the checkout. Lena is crossing over to New York for a job that promises Broadway stardom, leaving behind her job as a singer in a seedy bar, her best friend, and a murder that's casting a shadow over her life and her future.
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