Music and Murder

Dams’s far-fetched second mystery featuring widowed sleuth Elizabeth Fairchild (after 2021’s Murder in the Park) goes off the rails early. It’s been eight years since Elizabeth’s husband, Will, was killed at the end of WWI and she miscarried their child back home in suburban Illinois. Finally ready to turn over a new leaf, Elizabeth allows herself to be pursued by the free-spirited Fred Wilkins, who invites her to a jazz club in Chicago. She enthusiastically agrees, but their evening is disrupted when a bomb goes off in the building—likely the work of a Ku Klux Klan campaign targeting Black spaces—and nearly kills both of them. Upset that anyone could “go around hurling bombs all over the place with no reprisals,” and by the city government’s laissez-faire attitude toward “the blatant crimes of the bootleggers and gangsters,” Elizabeth is determined to bring the culprits to justice. Helping her out—thanks to a series of improbable contrivances—is none other than Al Capone. Dams fails to anchor the story in either a heightened fantasy world or the gritty real one, and uneasily mixes impassioned social politics with clumsy, coincidence-heavy plotting. Fans of Jazz Age mysteries have plenty of better options. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc. (Sept.)