Minotaur and the MWA's inaugural competition winner is an atmospheric, taut, and truly original historical mystery with an engaging main character and a gorgeously rendered setting: turn-of-the-century New York. Detective Simon Ziele lost his fiancee in the wreck of the General Slocum and shortly thereafter headed to Westchester County to escape the violence of the city. But just a few months into his tenure, he catches the worst homicide of his career: a young woman is brutally murdered in her own bedroom in the middle of a winter afternoon. A day's investigating leads him to Columbia University's noted criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, and one of his subjects, Michael Fromley, who has a history of violent behaviour and brutal fantasies. But what would lead him to target Sarah Wingate, a notable mathematics grad student at Columbia? Is it really Michael behind the murder, or is someone else copying his signatures? This is what Simon Ziele must discover, with the help of the brilliant but self-interested Alistair Sinclair, before the killer strikes again.
A completely enjoyable read by a new author. In the Shadow of Gotham is detective mystery novel that takes place in NYC at the very beginning of the 20th century. Detective Ziele partners up with a professor of criminology to find the person who killed a brilliant female math student. As far as detective novels go, it's not original or innovative, but it's extremely well-written and while I correctly identified the perpetrator near the beginning, Pintoff kept things mysterious enough that I always had two or three other possibilities in my head. I look forward to seeing what the author writes next.
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13 September, 2009:
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13 September, 2009:
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