Katharine Schellman Archives – Carol's Notebook

Author: Katharine Schellman

Katharine Schellman is a former actor and one-time political consultant. These days, she writes the Lily Adler Mysteries (Crooked Lane Books) and the Nightingale Mysteries (Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press). Last Call at the Nightingale is a Publishers Weekly Summer Reads Pick for 2022 and was a BookPage Most Anticipated Mystery & Suspense Book of 2022. Her debut novel, The Body in the Garden, was one of Suspense Magazine’s Best Books of 2020 and led to her being named one of BookPage’s 16 Women to Watch in 2020. Its sequel, Silence in the Library, was praised as “worthy of Agatha Christie or Rex Stout.” (Library Journal, starred review) Katharine lives and writes in the mountains of Virginia in the company of her husband, children, and the many houseplants she keeps accidentally murdering.

For Vivian, dancing at the Nightingale, and the occasional free drink, is a way to escape the dullness and monotony of her life. She and her sister, Florence, barely make enough to live on as seamstresses. They live in a crowded tenement building and life is tough. This is not a glitzy, sparkling 1920s setting. The bobbed hair, bootleg liquor, and dance halls are there, but so are the poverty, racial oppression, and police raids. We see Vivian's squalid building, but also the opulent homes of the rich. Vivian and her best friend, Bea, a waitress at the club, find a dead man in the alley outside the back door. Vivian becomes our amateur sleuth, with a gentle nudge from Honor Huxley, the club's owner. Honor knows how important, and deadly, information can be. The mystery has several twists and turns and the ending surprised me. I liked the diversity in the characters and that the Nightingale was a place that allowed...