The Twilight Hour

British commentator Wilson (The Lost Time Cafe), whose nonfiction focus is feminism and popular culture, does little with her intriguing choice of period in this unremarkable historical whodunit. 1947 London is beset both by a record-breaking freeze and by the country's bumpy return to normalcy after the traumas of WWII. Against this background, Wilson has placed a young and callow heroine, Dinah Wentworth, a newly-married socialite whose naïvete (and penchant for exclamation points) will grate on some readers. Wentworth's dull existence is brightened when her filmmaker husband, Alan, falls in with a mysterious Romanian film director, Radu Enescu, and his leading lady, Gwendolen Grey, who want to use him to write the screenplay for a romantic feature film. After Dinah stumbles across a corpse, she panics and doesn't notify the authorities, leading to predictable complications. An unsurprising solution to the murder and unconvincing period detail leaves readers as cold as the London winter.