Private detectives Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker are back. Series narrator Kirsten Potter returns with another smashing performance. It’s New York City, 1947. Holly Quick, writer of gruesome murder stories for STRANGE CRIMES magazine, hires Pentecost and Parker because she’s discovered that three murders from her stories were recently brought to life. But Holly won’t let the detective duo go to the police. What is she hiding? Potter gives Parker a smart-alecky tone without making her sound harsh. As Pentecost, “the greatest detective in New York City,” Potter sounds cultured, mysterious, and deserving of praise. Plot twists and Kirsten Potter’s narration put this P&P adventure right up there with the best. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Secrets Typed in Blood (Pentecost and Parker Mystery #3)
Narrated by Kirsten Potter
Stephen SpotswoodUnabridged — 9 hours, 40 minutes
Secrets Typed in Blood (Pentecost and Parker Mystery #3)
Narrated by Kirsten Potter
Stephen SpotswoodUnabridged — 9 hours, 40 minutes
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Overview
The Pentecost & Parker series "takes gritty 40s noir, shakes it up, gives it a charming twist, and serves it up with unforgettable style" (Deanna Raybourn, author of the Veronica Speedwell Mysteries). From the author of Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin.
New York City, 1947: For years, Holly Quick has made a good living off of murder, filling up the pages of pulp detective magazines with gruesome tales of revenge. Now someone is bringing her stories to life and leaving a trail of blood-soaked bodies behind. With the threat of another murder looming, and reluctant to go to the police, Holly turns to the best crime-solving duo in or out of the pulps, Willowjean “Will” Parker and her boss, famed detective Lillian Pentecost.
The pair are handed the seemingly-impossible task of investigating three murders at once without tipping off the cops or the press that the crimes are connected. A tall order made even more difficult by the fact that Will is already signed up to spend her daylight hours undercover as a guileless secretary in the hopes of digging up a lead on an old adversary, Dr. Olivia Waterhouse.
But even if Will is stuck in pencil skirts and sensible shoes, she's not about to let her boss have all the fun. Soon she's diving into an underground world of people obsessed with murder and the men and women who commit them. Can the killer be found in the Black Museum Club, run by a philanthropist whose collection of grim murder memorabilia may not be enough to satisfy his lust for the homicidal? Or is it Holly Quick's pair of editors, who read about murder all day, but clearly aren't telling the full story?
With victims seemingly chosen at random and a murderer who thrives on spectacle, the case has the great Lillian Pentecost questioning her methods. But whatever she does, she'd better do it fast. Holly Quick has a secret, too and it's about to bring death right to Pentecost and Parker's doorstep.
Editorial Reviews
09/12/2022
It’s 1947 in Spotswood’s strong third mystery featuring Lillian Pentecost, “the greatest detective in New York City,” and her assistant, Willowjean “Will” Parker (after 2021’s Murder Under Her Skin), and the duo’s newest client, Holly Quick, arrives with a particularly knotty problem. “Somebody is stealing my murders,” Holly declares. A prolific writer for a pulp magazine called Strange Crimes, she’s certain that someone is using the details in the stories she pens under the name Horace Bellow as the basis for three recent murders. Indeed, the descriptions of a hanging in Stuyvesant Square, a stabbing in Sunnyside, and a suspicious death at an antique shop on the Upper East Side all closely match her stories. Holly wants the detectives to investigate, but without tipping their hand to the cops, as it seems she has some secrets of her own to protect. Spotswood plays fair with readers in a complex plot offering plenty of vivid characters, clever dialogue, and plausible suspects. Pentecost and Parker are a great crime-fighting partnership whose popularity is bound to increase. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary. (Dec.)
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE • EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE
“This mystery, the third in a series, is as winning as its predecessors. Here, the famous P.I. Lillian Pentecost and her spiky junior partner, Willowjean 'Will' Parker, immerse themselves in the seedy milieu of pulp magazines, circa 1947. The novel reads as easy as fine whiskey goes down.”
—The New York Times Book Review
"Slick and exciting . . . Spotswood's third Pentecost and Parker adventure is a constant delight. . . The dialogue crackles, the mysteries intrigue and there is an abundance of wit and grit."
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
"You can’t get much better at honoring the golden age of pulp than Stephen Spotswood’s historical mysteries . . . In Spotswood’s latest, set in 1947, Parker and Pentecost are on the trail of a copycat killer getting all their ideas from the diabolical pages of a notorious pulp fiction writer. With dialogue and descriptions straight out of Chandler, and spunky heroines with plenty of pizzazz, Secrets Typed in Blood is not to be missed."
—CrimeReads
"Brilliant . . . the Pentecost & Parker series will thrill fans of Stout’s iconic characters."
—BookPage, starred review
“Spotswood plays fair with readers in a complex plot offering plenty of vivid characters, clever dialogue, and plausible suspects. Pentecost and Parker are a great crime-fighting partnership whose popularity is bound to increase.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Undeniably engaging."
—Kirkus Reviews
"As in the previous two books, the action is unrelenting, the plot serpentine, and the language delicious . . . Spotswood will, I hope, continue to delight readers with these witty, sophisticated, and wildly entertaining mysteries for many years to come."
—HillRag
"I just love this series."
—Red Carpet Crash
"Clever, queer-friendly . . . I was fully surprised by the twists and turns in the narrative as Parker hunts down criminals at the behest of her genius boss, like a female latter-day version of Archie Goodwin doing the legwork for the housebound Nero Wolfe."
—Criminal Element
Praise for Stephen Spotswood and the Pentecost and Parker Mystery series:
"Razor-sharp style, tons of flair, a snappy sense of humor, and all the most satisfying elements of a really good noir novel."
—Tana French, New York Times bestselling author of The Searcher
“A delight . . . it’s a pleasure to watch [Pentecost and Parker] sifting through red herrings and peeling secrets back like layers of an onion.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Bullets, blood, bodies, and belly-laughs: all the ingredients of a classic mystery novel. Stephen Spotswood hard-boils with the best of ‘em!”
—Alan Bradley, bestselling author of the Flavia de Luce Mystery Series
"Takes gritty 40s noir, shakes it up, gives it a charming twist, and serves it up with unforgettable style. My new favorite sleuthing duo are Pentecost and Parker, the spiritual sisters of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. . .Utterly brilliant!"
—Deanna Raybourn, author of the Veronica Speedwell Mysteries
07/01/2022
Someone is imitating Holly Quick's pulp-magazine tales of revenge to the letter, strewing 1947 New York's streets with dead bodies, and Holly quickly turns to Willowjean "Will" Parker and her boss, legendary detective Lillian Pentecost, for help. They've got to investigate the murders and find the culprit without alerting the police. Next in the Nero Award—winning "Pentecost and Parker Mystery" series.
Private detectives Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker are back. Series narrator Kirsten Potter returns with another smashing performance. It’s New York City, 1947. Holly Quick, writer of gruesome murder stories for STRANGE CRIMES magazine, hires Pentecost and Parker because she’s discovered that three murders from her stories were recently brought to life. But Holly won’t let the detective duo go to the police. What is she hiding? Potter gives Parker a smart-alecky tone without making her sound harsh. As Pentecost, “the greatest detective in New York City,” Potter sounds cultured, mysterious, and deserving of praise. Plot twists and Kirsten Potter’s narration put this P&P adventure right up there with the best. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
2022-09-14
Early 1947 provides Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker with a baffling new case and a continuation of an old one that just won’t go away.
Someone has been copying prolific pulp magazine writer Holly Quick’s stories. And it’s not just an ordinary plagiarist, but someone who’s bringing them to sanguinary life and death. The job Holly offers the one-eyed private eye and her hand-picked sidekick—to identify and decommission the copycat killer—should be straightforward, but it comes with a raft of restrictions. Holly won’t permit Lillian and Willow to go to the police or reveal her identity as the person behind all her male pseudonyms. She hides important information from them that they really need to know. Lillian is determined to start the investigation during the same two-week period when Willow is already unhappily undercover as secretary Jean Palmer at the law firm of Shirley & Wise, where her predecessor as Kenneth Shirley’s secretary was criminal mastermind Olivia Waterhouse, an old adversary of Lillian’s whose motives for her masquerade are a lot less clear than Willow’s. As if these aren’t enough difficulties, Darryl Klinghorn, the bedroom-peeping shamus Lillian hires to gather information on the three victims murdered in homages to Holly’s fiction, ends up getting killed himself, running his inquiries into an emphatic dead end. Both cases have their high points (lots of curveballs and some smartly retro feminism) and their low (the copycat is eventually unmasked as an entirely marginal figure, and the windup of the Waterhouse case is at once melodramatic, anticlimactic, and inconclusive).
Untidy but undeniably engaging.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940175758802 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Pentecost and Parker Series , #3 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The kidnapper was good, I’ll give him that.
He parked himself right next to the trash can, then pulled out a cigarette and a book of matches. He flubbed the first match and tossed it in the bin. That gave him the chance to eye the paper bag sitting on top of the lunchtime leftovers and discarded morning papers.
He flubbed the second match—not a hard thing to fake on a blustery January day. He tossed that second match in the bin, which gave him the opportunity to glance around and check out the people in his immediate vicinity.
There were plenty.
There might have been busier intersections in New York City than the corner of Forty-second Street and Madison Avenue, but you’d have to go hunting. Two dozen restaurants, bars, and greasy spoons were throwing their lunchtime crowds onto the sidewalk. Everyone was hustling to get out of the cold and back to work, warmed by overcoats, hats, and three-martini lunches.
It was a smart place and a smart play. It gave the kidnapper cover, and it made anyone standing still look mighty conspicuous.
People standing still included:
The newsstand owner hawking the latest copies of Life and Vogue and the Monday, January 20, 1947, edition of the Times and its assorted competitors. The kidnapper had probably scoped this spot out several days running, so he’d recognize the owner for genuine.
The drunk panhandling at the mouth of the alley twenty yards down. Too old to have served in the Pacific, but that’s what his cardboard sign proclaimed. The line seemed to be working for him if the pile of coins in his hat was any indication. He was a regular, too.
The girl in the phone booth, the one in the private-school uniform arguing with her mother in that kind of why-me whine fifteen-year-old girls hold a patent on.
“I want to see the matinee and it’s closing this week and Billy invited me! . . . He is not. . . . He would never. He’s a gentleman. His dad is vice president at Mavis and Mulgrave.”
No one to set off the fine-tuned alarm bells wired into the kidnapper’s nerves.
The man in question was dressed in assorted grays—light-gray suit, charcoal overcoat, gunmetal-gray porkpie. He had the kind of easy-smiling face you’d hire to play second-fiddle in a Seagram’s ad.
Pleasant and forgettable.
That forgettable mug and careful planning were the reasons he hadn’t gotten caught. And we were pretty sure he hadn’t gotten caught a lot.
This was a sample of what was going through my head as I defended fictional Billy to a dead telephone line: “I’ll come home after the show, I promise. . . . But, Mom, we’ve already got our tickets.”
I was thinking he didn’t look much like a kidnapper. Then again, they never do.
To be fair, I didn’t look much like a fifteen-year-old girl playing hooky. Even with the wool skirt and the school jacket and my frizzy red curls pulled into place with plastic barrettes.
Up close, I looked every bit my twenty-four years. Maybe a couple more, once you factored in mileage. But through the smeared, breath-fogged glass of the telephone booth, I could pass.
Also, I had the whine down pat.
“No, Mom, I love Billy. I loooove him.”
The easy-smiling man tore off a third match, struck it, and lit his smoke. He shook the match out. Then he carefully placed it in the garbage can, dipping ever so slightly to scoop up the paper bag at the top.
He took a moment to feel what was inside—three stacks of tightly bound bills. Then he was off, moving as fast down Madison Avenue as the post-lunchtime crowd would let him. I was out of the phone booth a moment later, hurrying to keep up, slipping in between the cracks in the masses with ease. I top out at five-two in flats, with a narrow frame that makes dress-fitting a pain but helps when I need to tail a crook.
Twenty seconds in and I was only three people back. The hope was that I could ride the kidnapper’s slipstream all the way to Wyatt Miller.
Wyatt had been snatched from his pram in Central Park three days earlier. His mother had been distracted giving directions to a German tourist, and when she turned back she found her fourteen-month-old darling gone. In his place was a typewritten note.
we have wyatt.
do not call the police.
we have people on the force.
we will know.
go home and await further instructions.
Gloria Miller ran back to her Upper West Side apartment and showed the note to her husband, who did the reasonable thing. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect him with the cops.
An overly gruff voice answered.
“Twentieth Precinct.”
“This is Simon Miller. My son’s been kidnapped. My wife was in Central Park and—”
The voice cut him off.
“What did we tell you, Mr. Miller? We told you not to call the police. We have people everywhere. This is your only warning if you want to see your son again.”
Then the voice instructed the Millers to gather ten thousand dollars in ransom money. The voice went so far as to instruct them on the best way to do it, naming bank accounts and telling them to cash in this or that stock.
The kidnapper really did seem to know everything.
What he didn’t know was that Mrs. Miller played a weekly bridge game with a group of wives, one of whose sister’s best friend had had something similar happen to her daughter a year before.
Back when it happened, it had made for juicy conversation between bids or rubbers or whatever the lingo is. I’m a poker girl, myself.
Naturally, the chatter had expanded to include what each card player would have done if such a thing happened to them. Someone had suggested that a private operator would be the best choice—someone who could work to bring the child back without the flash and show of the NYPD.
Gloria Miller raised the idea with her husband, who quickly nixed it. Private detectives were nothing but glorified grifters, he told her. While Mrs. Miller loved and cherished, she didn’t always obey. Which is why, while her husband was tying up the house phone making calls to his bank, she walked down the street and made a call of her own. This one to the offices of Pentecost Investigations, Lillian Pentecost being known far and wide as the greatest private detective working in New York City in that year of our lord 1947.
That reputation was kept fresh through the efforts of her erstwhile assistant, Willowjean “Will” Parker, who made sure her boss’s name appeared in the paper as often as legitimately possible, sometimes going so far as to flirt shamelessly with the editors. Which, if you’d met the editors in question, you’d know took a lot more acting chops than playing a whiny schoolgirl.
We took the case.
What followed was a whirlwind seventy-two hours. While the Millers got the ten grand together, Ms. Pentecost and I tracked down the friend of the sister of the bridge player—a Mrs. Diane Neary.
We couldn’t pick apart the Millers’ lives. There was a chance the kidnappers had them under surveillance, and we didn’t want to trip any alarm bells. So we dissected the Nearys’.
We talked to grocers and bankers and lawyers and landlords and housepainters and hairdressers and everyone listed in their address book. If we’d ever worked faster, I couldn’t remember it.
By the time the Millers got a call from Mr. Gruff giving them the details of the ransom drop, we had a theory and a plan and I was the first person on Mrs. Miller’s phone tree.
When the call came, I was camped out at a hotel two blocks from the Millers’ apartment. I’d spent the morning lounging in a robe, waiting as patiently as humanly possible. Laid out on the bed were a dozen choices. There was housewife, cabdriver, delivery girl, socialite, and barfly, among others.
As soon as Mrs. Miller told me the drop location, I hung up and placed a call of my own, relaying the information and confirming my own quick calculus that schoolgirl was the way to go.
I set a land-speed record for dressing, then ran downstairs and took a cab in the direction of the ransom drop. I got out five blocks short and walked the rest of the way in character, just in case the kidnappers had a lookout.
I got there about ten minutes before Simon Miller arrived, clutching the paper bag in both hands and looking terrified. I had already grabbed the phone booth, dropped in a nickel for show, and was deep into my one-sided conversation.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Pleasant-Face showed up.
Two minutes after that, I was riding his wake down Madison Avenue.
Now you’re all caught up.
I was two arm’s lengths away when Mr. Pleasant-Face made his move.
He put on a big show of looking at his watch, then took off running. I’d expected it. The fastest way of checking for a tail is to start sprinting and see who keeps pace.
Forewarned or not, he gained half a block on me before I got up to speed.
Luckily I’d added a pair of ten-inch military-style boots to my schoolgirl uniform. Not easy on the feet, but great for getting traction on the slush-slick sidewalk.
Early in the chase he glanced back and saw I was following. He picked up speed, then without warning dove into traffic. He slipped through unharmed, but I had to juke and dodge. A delivery truck screeched to a halt, its grille coming so close to my face I could feel the heat of its engine blast against my cheek.
At the end of the block he turned right on Thirty-ninth Street, sprinted the long block, turned left, sprinted another two blocks, then turned right again.
It seemed random, but I knew it wasn’t. This guy was a planner. He would have an escape route.
The best-case scenario had been trailing him unawares to wherever he was keeping Wyatt Miller. That was out.
The worst-case scenario was that he disappeared into one of the many office buildings we were passing. Then it’d become a snake hunt, and we didn’t know how much time Wyatt had.
I saw the move before he made it.
There was an alley halfway down the block. He sped up, glanced at the alley, then quickly looked away. I waved my arm in a circle over my head, sending a signal I hoped would be understood.
He darted into the mouth of the alley and I followed a second later.
Halfway down, he leapt over a broken crate. I opted for around rather than over, seeing too late the chain that had been stretched knee-length across the width of the alley.
I hit it full speed and went ass over teakettle, landing hard on concrete and filthy snow.
I wasted half a second making sure nothing was broken, then stumbled to my feet and started running again. By then he was nearly at the end of the alley. There was no hope of catching up.
A squeal of brakes and a chorus of car horns, and suddenly the mouth of the alley filled with the broadside of a yellow cab.
Pleasant-Face slammed against it and rebounded. He managed to stay on his feet and began a stumbling run back toward me. By that time I was up to full speed.
I brought my right leg up, kicking straight out and sending my size-seven boot deep into his gut.
He collapsed like someone had cut his strings.
I took the paper bag out of his limp hand and tucked it in my coat pocket. He groaned, and I saw him shoot a look past me and back to the end of the alley where we’d come in.
“Please don’t,” I said, unzipping my school jacket and giving him a peek at the holstered Browning Hi-Power. “My boss would like a word.”
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