Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC of this book.

This one had a premise that attracted me as soon as I saw the blurb. It’s obviously fiction but the author uses real golden age of mystery writers as the main characters and I am here for it.

The main protagonist is Dorothy Sayers. She had the great idea to start a club of detective fiction writers called the Detection Club. The only problem? The men who are part of the club she created are adamant that the only female members should be she and Agatha Christie.

This doesn’t sit well with the two women and Dorothy devises a plan to have them, along with three other female crime fiction writers, solve a real mystery.

A young woman has disappeared with no trace from a train station restroom in France. The bathroom has no exit other than the one door into the very public main station. No window, no air conditioner duct work, nothing to aid her in leaving the room without being seen. A true locked room mystery in a quite busy place.

The five ladies travel to France to see this room for themselves and try to solve this case, not only to find the missing woman, but figure out how the lady got out of the station without being seen. Dorothy has a secret of her own that she wants to keep hidden. That adds a unique component to the story.

Their adventure is undertaken with due seriousness as well as a bit of fun with taking tea and visiting shops to talk to potential witnesses. The plot moves along nicely.

I very much enjoyed the storyline as well as the personalities of the five main characters of whom I’ve read some of their work. Of course, these were fictional imaginings, but the author seemed to capture the spirit of each of the ladies as they appeared to be in life.

An interesting plot that was well-constructed and enjoyable to read. Many moments of the humanity of these women and how they related to each other and their friends and family also fully fleshed out the story. The locked room component was clever as well

A very enjoyable read.

BLURB:

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment.

May Daniels, a young English nurse on an excursion to France with her friend, seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later, her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of a crowded train station without anyone noticing? If, as the police believe, the cause of death is manual strangulation, why is there is an extraordinary amount of blood at the crime scene? What is the meaning of a heartbreaking secret letter seeming to implicate an unnamed paramour? Determined to solve the highly publicized murder, the Queens of Crime embark on their own investigation, discovering they’re stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy Sayers herself, threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to keep hidden.

Inspired by a true story in Sayers’ own life, New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict brings to life the lengths to which five talented women writers will go to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of letters as they unpuzzle a mystery torn from the pages of their own novels.