A Curtain Falls
by Stefanie Pintoff is the sequel to the Edgar Award finalist In the Shadow of Gotham. My book club picked the sequel to read so I
needed to tackle this one before the first.
I was a little apprehensive, because I thought I would have needed some
background, but I needn’t have worried. A Curtain Falls is a true mystery in its
own right and a darn good one at that.
Set in New York City in
one of my favorite time periods, the early 1900s, Detective Simon Zeile has
been asked to help on another case. A
serial killer is on the loose, murdering chorus girls in their theater houses,
and arranging them in macabre positions.
Zeile is asked to keep details very hush-hush, as all relevant theaters belong to
Charles Frohman, a very wealthy and powerful owner. With his gang of motley assistants, Zeile
rushes to solve the case before the next killing.
This is definitely a quick
page turner, and I must admit I was not able to predict the ending. While obviously not on the same level as Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, Pintoff succeeds in keeping the reader
guessing and building suspense. I look
forward to reading In the Shadow of
Gotham to get to know the history of Simon Zeile.
MY RATING - 4
