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I was reaching into my handbag for my cigarettes, hoping the familiar rush would calm me down, when a gust of wind tugged at my head scarf.
Serendipitously Lena has just been offered a chance to appear in a play on Broadway and has been given first class tickets on the Queen Mary by Charlie Bacon claiming to be a Broadway agent, a man she has never met before. Lena is a biracial woman who passes as white, and her time at sea shows her warring with herself, feeling like she has to pick a side, an identity to show the world.But death follows her onboard when an obscenely wealthy family draws her into their fold just as one among them is killed in a chillingly familiar way. Even though Lois told me this book had no connection with either Ella Fitzgerald or the song Miss Otis Regrets, I downloaded the audiobook from my local library, and I'm glad I did. We get Parker's photograph in the papers, with you sparkling beside him, people are gonna want to know who you are.
However, someone on board is wanting to make her life hell, and what better way than framing her for murder.
More than that, someone is not happy with Lena‘s presence and various scenarios occur that make her life very difficult and it is questionable whether she will even make it to Broadway. After a murder at the club, the timing couldn’t be better and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). The murder doesn't take place until a third of the way in, but the author is busy building up potential suspects, victims, and connections from the first page.
But it just felt like it was underwritten, and certainly I needed more reasoning and feeling behind the choices that are made. There are three more things which I found extremely annoying: the first one is that the two main mysteries were linked, but the link was once again so dumb and unbelievable it made me roll my eyes; the second one is also due to this fact and it’s that the motive of the murderer was stupid and not well explained at all. She feels like she’s with her own kind - people without money and influence, people who scrape by, who play music and really let their hair down. The conversation around race covers many aspects, including how Lena's experience once she reaches New York will likely be jarring as she's dropped right into the segregated muck of 1930s America. She covers up a murder, she uses cocaine, she lies, she drinks heavily, and she’s kind of a crappy friend.The dynamics in this book take on quite a few different directions, which include morality, alcohol and drugs, racism, class distinction, the unfairness that some women face and much more.
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