Jeanne M. Dams, author of the Dorothy Martin mysteries, kicks off the historical Oak Park Village mystery series with Murder in the Park. While the writing seems slow-paced and old-fashioned, there are little-known facts that history fans might find surprising.
Elizabeth Walker Fairchild appears to be an ice maiden. She was only married to her husband for six months before he died in battle in World War I. Then, she lost her baby. Now, seven years later, she’s still living with her parents, spending time on charities and women’s meetings. She’s closed herself off to most people, but she does enjoy talking with Mr. Anthony at his antiques shop. In fact, when her mother was fretting over her annual fundraising party, Elizabeth escaped to Anthony’s Emporium, hoping to buy a watch for her father.
Since she just saw him, she’s shocked the next morning when her father tells her Mr. Anthony was found stabbed to death outside his shop. But, Elizabeth’s self-control starts to melt a little when she learns Mr. Anthony was Enrico Antonelli, and a music teacher who teaches with her father has been arrested. The reason? He’s Italian, too, and several women claim they saw the teacher in the shop that night.
Elizabeth is outraged at the prejudice against Italians in Oak Park. In fact, it seems to be a group of women, the deeply conservative and mostly Protestant Walosas Club who are leading the attack. Those women are the active chapter of the Women’s Ku Klux Klan. In Oak Park, they’re protesting against the influx of Catholic Italians. If they can push the arrest of one for the murder of another, they’re pursuing their agenda.
Elizabeth is young, only twenty-six, but she finds the courage to push back. She realizes she’s cut off all her friends in her period of extreme mourning, but she recruits Ernest Hemingway’s influential mother, a lawyer who admires her, and a childhood friend. Despite danger, and threats from some of the local women, Elizabeth won’t back down in her attempt to find justice for Mr. Anthony.
While Elizabeth comes across as wealthy and ignorant at the state of the world, she realizes that in the course of the story. She realizes she knows nothing of the servants in her family household. She was raised to be a lady, and know nothing about a kitchen or how to iron her own clothes. And, some of the politics in the community comes as a surprise to her. Her father and her lawyer friend both remind her that she’s naive at times, and endangers herself. And, she does come across as naive when she confronts members of the Mob who are following her. Despite her liberal views, Elizabeth is conservative, and reminds people several times that it’s illegal to have liquor in Oak Park.
If you’re looking for faster-paced mysteries set in this same time period and the same geographical region, try Mary Miley’s Mystic’s Apprentice series set in Chicago. But, Oak Park has some surprises for readers. The Walosas Club is just one of them.
Jeanne M. Dams’ website is http://www.jeannedams.com/
Murder in the Park by Jeanne M. Dams. Severn House, 2022. ISBN 9780727850454 (hardcover), 224p.
FTC Full Disclosure – I read a galley for a journal review.
Hemingway hated his mother, who was not the most sympathetic woman.
I like the cover a lot.
I like that cover, too, Jeff. Very different from her Dorothy Martin mysteries.
Thanks Lesa for this review. I have read all of Jeanne Dams Dorothy Martin series (some better than others which happens with long running series) and enjoyed them vicariously when she travelled to places within Great Britain which I will probably never get to visit. I had not seen that she started a new book (series?) and will certainly give it a try. My library does not have it at this time but I will try to request it…..we shall see.
Good luck, Pat. I read an online galley, or I’d offer to send it to you. I hope your library gets it!
I found Elizabeth Fairchild, the protagonist, to be a bit Nancy Drew-ish, and that her admirer, Fred, was too terribly respectful. The author’s unflattering referral to Elizabeth’s mother as “Mother” hearkens back to the familiar prototype. In addition, there was the familiar distraction of the frequent meals and snacks that regularly occur in Dams’s other novels. Here, however, the difference is that when they’re drinking a lot, the beverages are non-alcoholic because of you-know-what.
Joan, In many ways, this is not only a traditional mystery, but a very old-fashioned one, as you point out.