Customer Reviews

Twist and Shout Murder:: A Murder A-Go-Go Mystery

5 star:		(3)
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After leaving her hometown of Richmond, Virginia for the excitement of New York City secretary Bebe Bennett follows her boss, the handsome and sexy Bradley Williams when he becomes head of the Ryan Modeling Agency. She loves him even though he calls her "kid" because he is a decade older than her twenty-two. She does a lot to light his fire including have her stewardess roommate buy her mod clothes, mini-skirts and go-go boots (after all the year is 1964.)

However, Bebe gets no satisfaction because Bradley is emotionally involved with the company's lead model, Suzie Wexford, a woman who knows she is beautiful and sexy, and uses her attributes to climb to the top of her profession. One night Bradley leaves Suzie's apartment to buy chocolate syrup, but when he comes back, he finds she is murdered, strangled with a scarf he gave her. The police,called by Suzie's neighbor, arrest him. Bebe intends to prove his innocence as she is sure that the killer is one of the many people who confided in her that they hated Suzie.

Using the vernacular of the youth of the swinging sixties, the music that was popular then, and the other aspects of the subculture of the teenage baby boomers, Rosemary Martin makes the era go-go in cool mod Technicolor. The heroine is an adorable character, a combination of steel and sock it to me vulnerability; readers hope that her boss sees her inner beauty and falls for her. There are plenty of suspects with viable motives and guessing who the killer is becomes part of the fun of this wonderful historical (my God my teen years are historical!) amateur sleuth mystery.

Harriet Klausner

Little tid bits of history and flashback lace this very cute mystery to the end. This newest book is better than the first even and will not disappoint the reader who buys it. I loved BeBe and her zany Roomie Darlene's antics. Of course BeBe only has eyes for her boss and he is trying his darndest not to fall head over heels for her. This ending took me totally by surprise. A cool whodonit to the end.

This is a nicely crafted piece of fluff that almost manages to hide its underlying cleverness. Rosemary Martin has fashioned her charmer of a heroine, Bebe Bennet, to fit neatly between Goldie Hawn in "The Cactus Flower" and Maggie McNamara in "The Moon is Blue." For those so young that those references suggest little or nothing--most of Martin's potential readership, I suppose--I mean that while Bebe is outwardly young, sweet, naive and charming, inwardly she is constructed of titanium and stainless steel, even though she herself is not yet aware that is the case.

I find myself to be an almost exact contemporary of Bebe's. Her world in this series of books is a pretty accurate depiction of the world of the 60s--not so much as it actually was but as many of us thought it was. I began seriously to work for a living at about that time. I shared office space with a number of near-Bebes and at least one absolute dead-ringer for her. Bebe's concerns with glamor, fashion and music are accurately depicted for at least that small segment of the population with which Bebe would have identified herself--as is the singular inability to see, even to the point of willful blindness, the grimly onrushing crises of Vietnam and civil rights.

Ms. Martin's prose is solid, if not especially memorable. Her sit-com characters are no more than lay figures, but they are used with writerly skill. Plot and pace are sufficient to keep the pages turning on a regular beat.

I think Ms. Martin's goal is simply to entertain. I think she achieves that goal--and perhaps rather more.

A ditsy, slightly guilty pleasure well worthy of five stars.