The Queens of Crime

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Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie returns with a thrilling story of Christie’s legendary rival Dorothy Sayers, the race to solve a murder, and the power of friendship among women.

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.

Synopsis source: Goodreads

What pattern is that?
Pictured with the book in this post is the Cozy Fireside Wrap – a pocket scarf pattern, which you can find free here on the blog!

Review

Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Mystery
HB&W Rating: 1 star
View on Goodreads
Buy on Barnes & Noble, Amazon
Releases February 11, 2025

I read and really enjoyed The Only Woman in the Room and The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by this author, and I was excited to be approved to read an eARC of this one, but the writing was a departure from Benedict’s usual style and it just didn’t work for me at all. Unlike her other books, where the story focuses on the heavily-researched, fictionalized stories of real-life women that allowed the reader to learn something about those women, The Queens of Crime focuses on Dorothy L. Sayers and four of her female contemporaries of the time, including Agatha Christie, and uses them as detectives to solve a murder mystery.

My first problem was the characters. I wasn’t able to connect with any of the characters at all. They felt two-dimensional and never came off the page for me. The dialogue, which I assume was intended to sound authentic, came off as stilted, lacking the panache and pluck these women must have had. The few tidbits of their real lives we pick up throughout the story didn’t really pack enough punch in either educating me or in connecting me to the characters or storyline much. In fact, I had to Google the Queens of Crime to see if this was a moniker assigned to the group by society or if they were actually as they were portrayed in the story, a self-appointed subset of the larger Detection Club, and I couldn’t find an answer, so hopefully there’s an Author’s Note added in the final copy of this book.

Probably the bigger problem I had was the pacing and writing. I found the pacing incredibly slow and the story much too drawn out. The writing itself was often pedantic and sometimes a little patronizing in how much was overexplained throughout. The book was fairly short and the chapters moved quickly, but it felt purposely drawn out, but could have been condensed even more by the time you remove unnecessary explanations and redundancies.

As a result of my problems with the characters, the pacing, and the writing in addition to the fact that I didn’t really learn overmuch about Dorothy L. Sayers and the Queens of Crime, I struggled to engage with this book. I pushed through because of my respect for the author, but I honestly almost DNFed this at least once a week during the month it took me to read it.

I am sad to say that I cannot recommend this one, unfortunately.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an eARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

Until next time,

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