6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Colorful and atmospheric mystery, December 22, 2000
In the 1920s in lower Manhattan, Olivia Brown lives life to the fullest. She enjoys living in the Village as a poet, loves to make love, and relishes assisting her neighbor, private investigator Harry Melville, with his cases.
Olivia travels to Croton up the Hudson from her home to attend a party that she feels will include literary peers and plenty of illegal booze. However, instead of a good time, the attendees argue, verbally ripping one another apart. The gala event totally collapses when Olivia discovers the frozen body of the hosts' nanny. Unable to leave the crime to law enforcement, Olivia cons Harry into assisting her with investigating the homicide.
MURDER ME NOW is a colorful historical fiction piece with a touch of a mystery to tie the vivid look at the literary set during the Roaring Twenties together. The story line is extremely entertaining for those readers who appreciate an opportunity to observe a bygone era. The who- done-it is well written and sub-genre fans will delight in its combination amateur sleuth cum private eye. Annette Meyers' second Brown mystery (see FREE LOVE) clearly belongs to the period that the plot lovingly describes to the audience.
Harriet Klausner
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Oliver! Oliver!, March 23, 2001
She's back, Olivia/Oliver Brown, poet/sleuth, that is.
This time she joins her bohemian friends at a rustic farmhouse for a weekend of gin, games, gossip, and sex for sex's sake. And the intrigue begins when tempers flare and the host and hostess seem to part ways. Then Olivia and current squeeze, Paulo, discover an icy apparition hanging from a tree. The frozen female is none other than the nanny of the host and hostess, Fordy and Kate Vaude.
The investigation of the suicide turned murder moves to Greenwich Village as the weekend guests return there for their "normal" lives. Thus, Olivia, Harry, Mattie, Gerry, and the Hudson Dusters once again join ranks to solve things first. (They all came together in Meyers' first Olivia Brown mystery, Free Love.)
Olivia waxes poetic and enthralls every male with whom she comes into contact, including the underworld character Monk Eastman who showers her with booze by the crate and roses by the dozen.
Meyers' delivers this easy read and keeps the solution a secret until the end. This Oliver adventure involves characters in the Secret Service, the Pinkertons, the Black Hand, and the Ivy League poetry effete. Olivia is still not my favoriate protagonist, by any means, but Meyers' certainly sets a scene of the decadence that followed the Great War in 1920's New York.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
a very good follow up mystery, January 30, 2001
I enjoyed "Murder Me Now" a whole lot better than I did "Free Love": the mystery in this novel is a compelling and interesting one; and as usual, Annetter Meyers has peopled her novel with alot of intriguing and appealing characters. I even liked Olivia Brown a lot better in this book than I did in the first! I only have three reservations about this Olivia Brown mystery: firstly that the murder victim remains an enigma even to the very end. We get very little idea of who she really is and what motivated her to do what she did; secondly, there were several oblique remarks made in this novel in reference to events that took place in the first book, with very little elaboration or enlightenment. This can be very frustrating if you haven't read "Free Love" yet. And thirdly, that the ending was incredibly rushed -- everything came together at a great speed in the last two chapters!
On the whole though "Murder Me Now" is an absorbing mystery novel which also gives the reader a very good idea of what life was like for the bohemians in the 1920s Greenwich Village, admidst Prohibition. A good read.
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