Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare

Canary Club Mystery #1

404 pages

Publisher: HarperCollins

Library

 

Blurb

A nightclub singer with more than one secret hastily leaves London on The Queen Mary after her best friend's husband is murdered...only to discover that death has followed her onboard, in this thrilling locked-room mystery.

London, 1936. Lena Aldridge is wondering if life has passed her by. The dazzling theatre career she hoped for hasn’t worked out. Instead, she’s stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho, and her married lover has just dumped her.

But Lena has always had a complicated life, one shrouded in mystery as a mixed-race girl passing for white in a city unforgiving of her true racial heritage. She has nothing to look forward to—until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York.

After a murder at the club, the timing couldn’t be better, and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. But when a fellow passenger is killed in a strikingly familiar way, Lena realizes that her greatest performance won't be for an audience, but for her life.

 

Review

My main reason for bringing this book home from the library, apart from the beautiful cover and the intriguing blurb, was that I had signed up on Netgalley to read and review the sequel. If at all possible, I much prefer to read my mystery series in the right order. While I can’t be sure until I read Harlem After Midnight, I’ve got a feeling that having already met Lena Aldridge when I start that book will stand me in good stead.

Lena Aldridge is a fascinating main character. She was raised by her musician father, who was black, and knows nothing about her mother except that she was white, which means that most of the time, Lena can ‘pass’. When the story starts, Lena’s father has recently died, she has broken up with her married lover, and she’s mostly disillusioned about her life and her job as a singer in a dingy nightclub. The club is owned by her best/only friend’s husband who has just announced that he wishes to divorce Maggie and leave her with nothing. When the husband is murdered in his club while Lena’s on stage, Lena’s life goes from uninspiring to outright frightening. Thankfully, Lena has a way of getting away from the madness because she has been made an amazing offer. An old friend of her father’s wants her to travel to New York to star in a Broadway production. The murder, and Lena’s uncertainty about what the consequences will be mean that she’s only too happy to leave London behind her and try for a new and brighter future on the other side of the Atlantic.

If you’re anything like me, you may wonder why a mostly streetwise woman like Lena would trust a stranger with an offer that sounds too good to be true. I pushed that niggle of doubt aside because being a possible accessory to murder might make most of us jumpy and prone to dodgy decision-making.

The crossing from England to New York should have been a time of rest and relaxation for Lena, but no amount of creature comforts makes up for the shock of having one of her fellow passengers dying in a way that is strikingly similar to the earlier murder in London. And that’s only the start of the violence on board.

I’m not going to say anything else about what happens next, except that if you are expecting a traditional mystery in which the main character investigates what’s going on, this isn’t quite that. While Lena does think about everything that happens, she doesn’t try to get to the bottom of it and the only reason she and the reader find out what did happen and why, is because the guilty party spells it out for her. I have to admit I didn’t see the solution coming, which for me is always a positive in a mystery.

I really liked this story. It gave me a smooth read and featured a fascinating character. Lena captured my interest right from the start. It’s great when the main character is multi-faceted, and boy are there a lot of sides to Lena, and not all of them are what you would call positive character traits. Which is of course what made her relatable and so much fun to read about. Since the story is told in Lena’s voice and from her perspective, we don’t get to know the other characters in this story as well, especially since she only spends a few days with them on the crossing to New York. And I have to say that most of the others felt a bit two-dimensional. Again, this is perfectly understandable given how the story is told, but it did mean I was less invested in what had happened to them or why.

And that brings me to my one ‘issue’ with this book. While I enjoyed reading the story whenever I picked the book up, the story never gripped me in such a way that I couldn’t wait to get back to it. There was none of the usual urgency I experience when I’m reading a mystery. Combine that with the fact that both the set-up and the solution, while original, felt a little far-fetched and you’ll understand why I rated it 3.5 stars. Having said that, I am looking forward to reading the sequel, Harlem After Midnight, soon because spending time with Lena Aldridge is unlikely to be boring.