Harlem After Midnight by Louise Hare

#2 Canary Club Mysteries

Publisher: HQ

Pages: 416

Release Date: September 14, 2023

Netgalley

 

Blurb

1936, September 17th, 1am…

In the middle of Harlem, in the dead of night, a woman falls from a second storey window. In her hand, she holds a passport and the name written on it is Lena Aldridge…

Nine days earlier…

Lena arrived in Harlem less than two weeks ago, full of hope for her burgeoning romance with Will Goodman, the handsome musician she met on board the Queen Mary. Will has arranged for Lena to stay with friends of his, and this will give her the chance to find out if their relationship is going anywhere. But there is another reason she's in Harlem – to find out what happened in 1908 to make her father flee to London.

As Lena's investigations progress, not only does she realise her father lied to her, but the man she’s falling too fast and too hard for has secrets of his own. And those secrets have put Lena in terrible danger…

 

Review

This book starts almost at the point where Miss Aldridge Regrets ended. For that reason alone, I recommend that you read these books in order. I’m not saying you can’t read this story as a stand-alone, but you’ll get a lot more out of it if you’re familiar with what has happened before. What’s more, events come full circle in Harlem After Midnight.

And while I’m on the subject of how this book starts; I hope you’re ready for a shocker. The first scene of the book features a young woman on a Harlem pavement. She appears to have fallen out of a window and is clutching Lena Aldridge’s passport. What on earth is going on?

Actually, it will take some (reading) time before you discover what happened in that prologue. The timeline of the story moves back nine days, and we join Lena after she has moved in with friends of her lover, Will. Over the next few days, we follow Lena as she tries to find out about her father’s life in New York before he travelled to London. At the same time, she tries to figure out what her future should look like. Does she return to London and her friend Maggie, as she originally planned, or could there be a future for her in America after all…a future with Will?

Slowly, through meeting his family and from stories told by his friends, Lena gets to know Will better and it isn’t long before she realises that Will has a few secrets in his past. Not that she can complain about that. It is not as if she has told him all her secrets either. But, over the nine days, the atmosphere around her goes from friendly and welcoming to fraught and a little hostile, although Lena has no idea why.

Things come to a head on the night of a party with a woman falling from the window of Will’s friends’ apartment and Will being the main suspect.

Since I try to avoid spoilers at all costs, that’s all I’ll say about the mystery. As for the story, it is just as fascinating as the prequel. Except that in this case there is more than one mystery from the start. While most of the story is told from Lena’s perspective and focusses on her stay in New York, other sections are set in 1908 and voiced by her father and one other character who will remain unidentified in this review.

I’m obviously not going to reveal how any of the mysteries in this story are resolved, but I do have thoughts I want to share about those resolutions. For starters, I found the resolution to the mystery of the fallen woman as dubious as the one in Miss Aldridge Regrets. The answer is provided and makes sense but whether or not you’d call it satisfactory depends on your personal opinion. As the word dubious implies, I remain to be convinced. Furthermore, while the reader finds out exactly why Lena’s father left New York for London, it is a little unclear whether or not Lena herself was aware of his ultimate goal. Then again, for her sake, I’m inclined to hope that she didn’t figure it all out.

Having said all of the above, the story did fascinate me. The setting, the characters, and the interactions between them grabbed my attention. The book is very well written, and my reading experience was smooth and enjoyable. While this book may not completely satisfy the mystery purists, I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy a combination of captivating characters, a rich historical setting, and enough intrigue to keep them on their toes.

I wonder if there will be more Lena Aldridge mysteries. While this book could easily be the end of her story, I wouldn’t be sorry if Louise Hare decides to feature her in future books. Reservations or not, Miss Aldridge has gotten under my skin.

 

 

 

 

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.