A New York Times Book Review Editor s Choice Rex Stout meets Agatha Christie with a fresh twist in the new Pentecost and Parker Mystery, a delightfully hardboiled high-wire act starring two daring women sleuths dead set on justice as they set out to solve a murder at a traveling circus
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
Someone s put a blade in the back of the Amazing Tattooed Woman, and Willowjean Will Parker s former knife-throwing mentor has been stitched up for the crime. To uncover the truth, Will and her boss, world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost, travel to the circus, where they find a snake pit of old grudges, small-town crime, and secrets worth killing for.
Will called Hart & Halloway s Traveling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus s tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse, the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go.
To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all. The two swiftly find themselves lost in a funhouse of lies as Will begins to realize that her former circus compatriots aren t playing it straight, and that her murdered friend might have been hiding a lot of secrets beneath all that ink.
