February 25, 2019
The strangling death of priggish dairy owner Clarence Pritchard, found on the grounds of Manhattan’s Trinity Church on New Year’s Day 1900, drives Thompson’s discursive 22nd Gaslight mystery (after 2018’s Murder on Union Square). Pritchard’s bereft daughter, Theda Ellsworth, hires private detective Frank Malloy and his wife, Sarah, to find her father’s killer because the police seem uninterested in solving the case. Sarah is eager to help, since the Malloys saw Pritchard behaving strangely on New Year’s Eve, wandering around the crowd of celebrants in the street, trying to convince anyone who would listen that the new century actually begins in 1901. Frank discovers that Pritchard’s son, Harvey, a compulsive gambler, is deep in debt to a mobster who’s using the dairy’s milk trucks to transport stolen goods. When Harvey turns up strangled as well, Frank’s investigation is back to square one. The plot tends to wander and some loose ends are left dangling, but historical details about social conditions in turn-of-the-20th-century New York elevate an otherwise routine mystery. Agent: Nancy Yost, Nancy Yost Literary.