Customer Reviews

Free Love (Gemstar)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a departure for Meyers, who up until now has written wonderfully about Wall St. in the great Smith and Weston series. The time is 1920 and the new character is a poet named Olivia Brown who lives in Greenwich Village and runs around with other artists from pub to pub when she's not working. She accidentally gets herself involved in a murder (naturally) and I for one didn't figure it out, which is odd for me. It's beautifully written, warm and funny but with a gritty edge. This is a must read. A+

In the late sixties, young people flocked to Haight-Asbury seeking free love, intellectual stimulation, and easy access to drugs. The flower children thought they discovered the true meaning of freedom. However, in 1920 in Greenwich Village, free spirits lived outside society's even stricter rules.

Olivia Brown refuses to live by any rules other than her own. When her guardian dies, she inherits an almost empty house in the Village. Her recently published poetry received attention from Vanity Fair and Vogue. She has many swains, but is selective as to who her current lover of the moment is. Though prohibition is the law, she drinks whenever she wants to imbibe.

On the way to a production that she is a participant, Olivia finds the corpse of her own doppelganger. She later learns that the deceased is actually a male. Olivia begins sleuthing. However, anyone she questions turns up murdered. Someone is destroying her property, leaving behind ugly items for her to easily find, and painting her as a serial killer. The poet knows someone stalks her with a vengeance that would frighten a lesser person.

Annette Meyers captures the essence of the bohemian movement so fully that the atmosphere of 1920 Greenwich Village feels eerily similar to that of the sixties. FREE LOVE contains an entertaining historical mystery that centers on a unique amateur sleuth. However, the tale provides a social commentary on individuals who choose to live outside society's norm, a circumstance that leads to freedom and pain. Ms. Meyer's opening gamut will thrill sub-genre fans who will want more tales from the 1920's Lower Manhattan.

Olivia (or Oliver as she is known to her Greenwich Village friends) Brown is the kind of historical female sleuth that readers of this genre would love to love. Unfortunately, beyond telling us that this is 1920 Greenwich Village and the Prohibition puts a cramp in the artistic lifestyle, author Annette Meyers does little to evoke a true sense of place. The dialogue reads as very 1990s and I was surprised to read that a character attended a lecture by the famous woman rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who died in 1902.

The plot is also weak, centering on a case of obsession. I thought that the perpetrator was very obvious and that a young woman who had already been involved in some detective work would have pulled everything together much quicker.

I may take a look at Meyers's planned sequel, but it will have to be a whole lot better for me to read the whole thing.

Annette Meyers delivers a wonderfully different mystery and an egregarious eccentric in the Flapper era poet, Olivia Brown. Olivia might not match Sherlock Holmes but the writing style of FREE LOVE is a delight and the plot satisfying. I enjoy quirky books, and FREE LOVE captures the Jazz Age's daring people, clothing and lifestyles. Looking forward to Olivia's next adventure in the series.

While I enjoyed this Annette Meyers murder mystery enough to keep reading, I tired of the cigarette smoke and gin and sexual dissipation. I don't think I am really old-fashioned, but I found Olivia Brown to be young and shallow.

Her bohemian life in the environs of Greenwich Village circa 1920 is intriguing enough for a relaxing read, however. And, I, too, was not sure I had the culprit clearly named until pretty close to the end. Actually, the obsession of the men around Olivia (Oliver to her cronies) is believable, if one realizes that they are all gin-soaked and willing to participate in any free love (sex) made so readily available.

The strong friendship between Olivia and her caretaker Mattie is touching. Once again we see the faithful servant class guarding and protecting their upper class employer. Lucky Olivia to have inherited this brownstone from her rebellious great aunt Vangie, to have inherited Mattie's help, and to have inherited in perpetuity, a private eye tenant, Harry Melville.

Olivia's interjected poems reflect the supposed burning genius of an artist whose decadent life fuels her gift. Some of those "inspirations" fell cold on me. Olivia's theatrical experience, particularly in O'Neill's off-Broadway introduction of The Emperor Jones, was quite sensual and led me to believe that it would not have taken much for Olivia to have shared a bi-sexual liason with the women in her group.

I am sure I will try the next Olivia Brown novel when Meyers publishes it. In the meantime I will try her Smith and Wetzon and her co-written Dutchman series. Having seen Meyers and her spouse Marty on CBS Sunday Morning as a featured couple, I want to read what they have written, just for kicks.

Poet Olivia Brown's new life in her recently inherited brown stone house in Greenwich Village is shattered when she trips over a dead body whose face strongly resembles her own. When threats to her own life keep popping up, she joins forces with her lower level tenet, hard living private detective Harry Melville, to seek an end to this mounting terror. Who is the culprit, and why is he after her?

Olivia thrives in Greenwich Village which had become home to a fascinating mix of free spirits, eccentrics, writers, jazz musicians and social activists. Most are young, few with any money. Meyers has credibly created the Village atmosphere where intellectual life encouraged late night discussions in "tea" and "coffee" houses, along with excessive smoking and drinking in spite of Prohibition, and often done in defiance of it. The book's title reflects this time of freedom when women chose lovers and abandoned them at will in great contrast to the mores of the Victorian age!

Period personalities appear in the plot such as Steven Lowell, the Providence Players, and the Hudson Dusters, the notorious Irish street gang whose members end up protecting Olivia more than once. Since Meyers' character is loosely based on the poet Edna Vincent Millay, poetry related to the plot is interspersed throughout the book - a nice touch.

Meyers includes comments about the history behind the story. This is the first of her Olivia Brown series. They are nice companion books to the 1920s San Francisco Fremont Jones series by Dianne Day.

Scene: Greenwich Village, 1920s. Main character: Olivia Brown. What she finds: A body that looks like her. Things are happening all over Greenwich and they all seem to tie back to Olivia. With the aid of her boarder Harry, a private investigator, Olivia starts to seek the truth. A good vacation book that lured me in and kept me reading to the end (and for once I didn't peak at the ending).

Olivia was having the time of her life. She could finally have fun and concentrate on her work at the same time. After drinking with her friend Whitt, they stumble out into the rain and discover a women's body. Shortly after this she starts to be harassed. With the help of her friend Harry, a private investigator, she cracks the case, and finds that it was Bennett. He was trying to get everyone out of the way so he could run away with Olivia. He also was harassing her so she would run to him with all of her problems and have a shoulder to lean on. This book was very suspicful, and I recommend it whoever loves a good mystery book.

The book is good because it shows what life was like back in the roaring 20's. A lot of the women started to come out of their normal modest life and started to "spice things up". Olivia and her friends drank alcohol, which became a lot more popular with women around the 20's, when prohibition started. They were free spirits. Some were poets, while others were actresses, singers, or dancers. But none the less they lived happy lives.

The author has a very creative way of writing her mystery books. She changes things from the predictable motives. For example, in this book sometimes the killer didn't have a set motive for killing a person. She made it so that readers had to think about what ties the person to his main motive. Which makes it ideal for someone who likes books that make them think.

This book is very suspenseful. Just when you find out something, it twists and goes ina completely different direction than expected. When Olivia and Whitt find the woman's dead body, in a few days she comes to find out that the women is actually a man, who is obsessed with her, and wants to become her. When the next murder takes place, the only way they found the murder weapon was when Olivia was playing around with a piano and she realizes that one of the keys sounds funny, and she opens the lid, and finds the knife. Little did I know that the piano from earlier in the book would come back to play such an important role.

Free Love, by Anne Meyers, is a wonder mystery that takes place during the flashy period of the 1920's. You will instantly fall in love with the characters, especially Olivia Brown. Read this if you want to read a book that suspenseful mystery.

Escapist fiction for me is a story so atmospheric that long after closing the book I can still visualize the scenes. Ms. Meyers' debut of Greenwich Village bohemian Olivia Brown and her motley crew of characters does just that. Yes, Olivia is shallow and self-absorbed, but, hey, she's only in her 20's. If this series is ever interpreted as a movie, buy stock in tobacco. Every other page someone was lighting up a cigarette, to the point, unfortunately, that it was a distraction. Did they really smoke non-stop in the '20's? We'd have no 85-year olds alive today! That aside, this entertaining mystery has me primed for the second in the series, Murder Me Now.

World War I has just ended. The men who are coming home have come, Prohibition is in place. Women have the Vote, bob their hair and are trying all of the new freedoms open to them including the right to pursue casual sexual liasons.

Olivia's fiancee died in the War, her remaining family killed by the influenza, finds herself the possessor of a house in Greenwich Village that had belonged to her Great Aunt Vangie. There she resides with her maid Mattie and her downstairs tenant, Harry Melville, a private investigator. She writes poetry successfully, drinks and smokes to excess and enjoys men with an almost frenzied heedlessness.

But one day while on the way to meet with some of her other friends she discovers a body lying in pool of water in the street. In the days that follow she receives threatening messages, Harry is beaten up in an alley and, as she tries to discover what is happening, a trail of deaths follow her.

There's one annoying moment when Olivia has a lapse of intelligence, other than that, the book does a good job of creating a believable picture of Jazz Age Greenwich village, from it's Irish gangsters to the Provincetown Players.