Fiction Fans

A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant

• Episode 195

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Your hosts discuss A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant. They talk about murder mystery tropes, new (to them) settings, and octogenarian character casts.


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Thanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:

- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris”
- Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License


Lilly:

Hello and welcome to Fiction Fans, a podcast where we read books and other words too. I'm Lily.

Sara:

And I am Sarah, and today we will be discussing a murder for Ms. Hortense by Mel Pennant.

Lilly:

But before we get into that, our quick five minute intro, what is something great that happened recently?

Sara:

I made soup stock.

Lilly:

Hoo yum.

Sara:

Yes, I've been meeting.

Lilly:

or

Sara:

Just a, just a regular pot on the stove. Yeah. I've been meaning to use up these bags of like veggie scraps and bones in the freezer for longer than I should have, but I finally used them up, so I'm very pleased.

Lilly:

Wonderful. That's great. Do you have any plans for the stock or is it just good to have?

Sara:

It's just good to have.

Lilly:

That's true. My good thing is I went on a little cation last weekend.

Sara:

Nice.

Lilly:

We went to a city that I've never, it's always nice to go to a new city and just poke around. It was only like an hour away. So, like I said, it was just a day trip. But Bremerton is very cute and it's close. We had to go all the way over there to see a movie that's only in like two theaters in the whole state.

Sara:

What movie?

Lilly:

Friendship.

Sara:

I've not heard of it, but that's not surprising given how frequently I watch movies.

Lilly:

You would hate it.

Sara:

I, the, the title doesn't inspire me. I'll be, I'll be honest.

Lilly:

It's advertised as Tim Robinson and Paul which is true. Those are the two main characters. They are played by Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd.

Sara:

Oh wait. Is this the one where they like go on a road trip from Southern California to like San Francisco or something?

Lilly:

No.

Sara:

Okay.

Lilly:

They're neighbors and they try to be friends except Tim Robinson is bad at being friends with people. It's a lot of cringe humor.

Sara:

It. That does not sound like my kind of movie at all. I think the one that I'm thinking about is like their brothers and they go on a road trip. I have no clue who's in it. That's just, it sounded like that fit the title.

Lilly:

That does not ring any bells, but I would go see anything in a vintage movie theater. So, hey, I'm happy.

Sara:

Well, I'm glad that you had a nice cation.

Lilly:

Yeah, what are you drinking tonight?

Sara:

I am drinking a Jamaican mule without the lime, which does basically just make it dark and stormy, but that's not quite as on theme. So.

Lilly:

I didn't realize that lime was not in a dark and stormy normally.

Sara:

It is apparently not. You get a lime garnish and you can squeeze it into your drink, but also dark and stormy is apparently copyrighted. And you can only call it a dark and stormy if you are using like gosling rum, a very specific brand of rum, which I did not know until I started researching for my drink tonight.

Lilly:

well, that sounds lovely. And on theme, I am drinking a. What is ostensibly a blood orange, carrot and ginger kombucha. It just tastes like kombucha. Maybe there's some ginger in there. I don't know.

Sara:

I mean, kombucha does usually just taste like kombucha. In my experience,

Lilly:

Have you read anything good lately?

Sara:

I have actually gone back to doing a little bit of reading. So I've gone back to my reading it's, what's it called? Tolkien and the study of his sources, which is a collection of like academic essays on Tolkien and the study of his sources. And they have been quite good for the most part. There was one that I thought was mediocre. But the rest of them I've really enjoyed so far.

Lilly:

Well, nice. I'm glad I did read a Murder for Miss Hortens.

Sara:

Yes, we both read a murder for Miss Corten.

Lilly:

We are on a murder mystery kick. This wasn't like super on purpose, but it's been fun. I've been enjoying it. Anyway,

Sara:

I've been enjoying it too. It's not a genre that I typically read a lot of, but it's a genre that I enjoy. So I'm not complaining that we've been reading a lot of it, I will say. So we did get advanced copies of this and although the book is by now out and this is entirely, entirely, entirely a me thing. But somehow the combination of like the size of this advance copy, just like the physical size of the book and the font made it really hard for me to pay attention to what was actually happening. I have, I've not had this problem before, so it was kind of wild.

Lilly:

I similarly, the paper was too white. It was so bright, it hurt my

Sara:

was, it was just, there was just something about this arc that just, it felt like reading a printed out like book from, that you printed off like a fan fiction from your, from your own printer.

Lilly:

But the cover on the other hand is gorgeous. I love it. The

Sara:

the cover.

Lilly:

graphic with the dominoes and the blood and oh, it is good. I love murder mysteries.

Sara:

the cover is excellent. I actually prefer the UK cover, which is the same style, but slightly different, but they're both very graphic and good.

Lilly:

So this book takes place in England and it is a immigrant community, I think. Is everyone from Jamaica in the

Sara:

Yes. Yes. So it's, and it's like 1990s England as well, I believe. And sixties. Yes.

Lilly:

there are a lot of flashbacks.

Sara:

There are a lot of flashbacks, but it's not, my point was that it's not what we would consider modern day.

Lilly:

Okay. Fair. And also the main characters are all, I would say on the older side. For a typical main character,

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

don't get a lot of. Action heroes who are in their eighties. And I mean, Ms. Hortenz isn't exactly an action hero, but she's not, not

Sara:

I

Lilly:

gritty detective, maybe I should say.

Sara:

she solves a murder. That's basically the same thing I.

Lilly:

that was really fun. I don't know much about, britain in the nineties for starters or like race dynamics, how they handled immigration. Not great, it sounds like. And also I probably could have guessed, I don't think that was a roadblock to my reading in any way though. Like you get plenty of context.

Sara:

Yeah, about the extent of my knowledge of. Jamaican immigrants in England is, I watched a play when National Theater at the height of COVID was releasing a free play on YouTube every week. I watched one about Jamaican immigrants coming to the uk and that's the extent of my knowledge. But like you said, I didn't feel that that was a roadblock or a, a detriment, like it didn't disrupt the reading experience for me.

Lilly:

No, and it is always fun like reading about. A culture that I'm not familiar with, especially since there was so much food in this book. Holy shit.

Sara:

Yes. I am always a fan of recipes and books, and we do get a couple of recipes. Miss Horton's, like cooks or bakes at a. A few different points in the story and we actually get the recipe and kind of instructions as she's doing it, which is fun. I like, I love that. I think more books should do that.

Lilly:

Yeah, they were. Outside of my, like, cooking comfort zone, but I do really wanna try at least one of these, the, the coconut like dessert pastry that I think she bribes someone with at one point, which is like a plus. I love it.

Sara:

That was, that was one where I was like, I love that there's a recipe for this. It's not something I wanna try.'cause I probably is not to my taste, but still, it was just, it was fun. It's a nice touch.

Lilly:

Especially because it is focused so much on this community and food is often one of the things that you are able to take with you, right?

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

you, if you immigrate to another place. So I thought that was a really nice touch of helping the reader sort of understand. I mean, I'll never really know what it's like, but.

Sara:

it felt really grounding.

Lilly:

Yeah. Okay. So there were really two, well, if not more than two mysteries in this book, but there are two sort of timelines that we're following. There is the present day mystery that Ms. Hortens is sort of enfolded into at the beginning of this book, but then there's also one that happened back in. Well, not entirely in the sixties, but in the past that we, the reader, sort of get brought into in bits and pieces as Ms. Hortens is remembering things or another character is, revealing to someone else. And I really loved the way those two sort of plot lines interwove through the bulk of this book.

Sara:

It was really well done. And it definitely kept me interested the entire time. Like I wasn't, you know, sometimes when there's different timelines you really only care about one. and you just wanna get back to that one.'cause that's where all of the interesting things are happening. It wasn't the case for this. I was invested in, both times. And what was going on in both times.

Lilly:

absolutely. There were. A lot of characters

Sara:

Not gonna lie, I would've liked a cheat sheet at the end

Lilly:

I needed like a family tree. There were so many. Not just that there were so many characters.'cause I could generally remember like where a character was in the mystery, but there was enough relations and mingled family trees. I was like, wait, they're cousins. Hold on. What? What's going on? Happened a few times.

Sara:

Yeah, I was mostly okay on that front, but there was one point near the end where someone mentioned that they were cousins with another character, and I was like, wait, was I supposed to know that I.

Lilly:

Well, I think that was the book reminding us, which Thank you, pennant. I did need that reminder.

Sara:

I did need that reminder. Yes, clearly

Lilly:

Oh, well. I think we're running into the age old problem where you can't talk too much about a murder mystery without spoiling everything.

Sara:

is kind of difficult. It's true.

Lilly:

Yeah. Is there anything else? I guess part of the, the concept of the book is that in this community, they have had to sort of manage their own justice, which sounds a lot more like vigilantism than it really ends up on the page. But. Law enforcement has just, you know, in the past decided, eh, who cares? And then later on, well, that's a spoiler conversation I just realized. But they, they continuously run into law enforcement being completely useless. And so having to investigate for themselves, and I think that added a really nice, like. Poignancy to it. Sometimes when there's a detective story, especially more modern ones, it's like, why are you doing, why are you the one doing this?

Sara:

It did feel very, I mean, Ms. Horten's investigation felt very relevant to what was happening. Because yeah, people wouldn't investigate otherwise. You know, law enforcement just didn't care'cause they weren't the right skin color.

Lilly:

Right. I guess I like that it answers my often. Shouted question of just call the police.

Sara:

Yeah,

Lilly:

I think that's a problem I have more with movies than than books.'cause books usually have the time to go into why it has to be this random person instead of someone whose job it is. But it's, yeah.'cause they're not gonna help and they have said bluntly to their faces that they're not going to help. So,

Sara:

there is an answer to that question.

Lilly:

which is. More complicated because Horten's nephew is a police officer, and that gets a little messy in a way that I quite enjoyed. But again, spoilers, speaking of police,

Sara:

I will just say that the character dynamics in this were very good.

Lilly:

very thoughtful and complex and messy and human.

Sara:

Yes,

Lilly:

Some of them frustrated me immensely, but I think that's a good thing.

Sara:

yes. I mean, I, I didn't always like them. Some characters frustrated me quite a bit. Miss Hortens, in fact, frustrated me quite a bit, but they all felt like I liked their relationships with each other. They felt. Developed and nuanced and not just like 2D, you know, tropes, mystery tropes.

Lilly:

Yeah. Miss Hortens, I think it's maybe supposed to be a charming old lady thing. She was very rude and like would cut people off while they were answering her question and hung up on her nephew when he was mid-sentence, when she called him for help. And that bothered me immensely, which did make reading this book,

Sara:

ms. Warten was very abrupt.

Lilly:

that just, that feels like a youth, like that's too nice. That is too kind because abrupt is like, I don't know, saying bye and hanging up the phone. I. Not going, oh, see you soon. Oh, how's it going? Like, no small talk. No. She would like several times just absolutely shut someone down. It, it was not charming. It was not enjoyable for me, I don't think. Just because you're old, you get to be rude and that's fine. That's not just a personality quirk, that's manners. And especially because she's so shitty to some of the younger characters about their manners. It's like, well,

Sara:

It is true. She does make a lot about manners with the younger characters and does not always reciprocate. I felt.

Lilly:

not even to her, quote unquote equals or to the other people of her generation. At least it would be consistent if she was like, yeah, the young folks we, we shit on. That's fine.

Sara:

she's kind of shitty to her best friend too.

Lilly:

Yeah, but that's'cause Blossom is annoying.

Sara:

I mean it's, it is kind of understandable.

Lilly:

I really love their relationship. Okay, we have to get to the spoiler section'cause I'm gonna die Sarah, who should read this book?

Sara:

You should read this book if you want a fun murder mystery set in England.

Lilly:

Yeah. Following older characters and I, I wanna clarify. I'm not like, oh, they're 37. That's so old.

Sara:

No, these are actual like retirees. They're like in their eighties

Lilly:

yeah. In my defense.

Sara:

also. Gee 37 doesn't, from my vantage point 37 doesn't feel that old anymore.

Lilly:

That was the point. It's not

Sara:

I know, I know. I know it. I know, I know. Like, but when you're 1537 does feel old. And when you're 35, 37 does not feel old.

Lilly:

Mm-hmm. Oh, that's 24 months from now.

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

that for a horrifying sentence?

Sara:

Thank you for making my day even better. This episode of Fiction Fans is brought to you by fiction fans.

Lilly:

That's us. We really appreciate our patrons because otherwise we fund this podcast entirely ourselves.

Sara:

Patrons can find weekly bonus content, monthly exclusive episodes, and have free access to our biannual zine, sotia issue three of which just came out last week.

Lilly:

Time travel.

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

You can find all of that and more at patreon.com/fiction fans pod. Thank you for all of your support,

Sara:

The remainder of this episode contains spoilers.

Lilly:

Gregory.

Sara:

I loved Gregory. Gregory was fantastic. Poor guy.

Lilly:

Oh my God. He is trying his best. His aunt just keeps apparently getting him in trouble.'cause it's implied that she got him in some deep shit a couple of years before the book.

Sara:

Well, okay, I wanna caveat that. So Gregory is the nephew of Ms. Hortens who is also a policeman. Yes. His aunt got him to investigate something a couple of years ago that got him into deep shit. But how much of that was because his boss was a racist asshole who was actually doing illegal things?

Lilly:

I was, I was gonna say, I mean, he was probably racist too, don't get me wrong, but I thought the bigger problem with his boss was that he was corrupt and clearly taking bribes. To ignore crime.

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

I mean, they, I'm not saying he's not racist, but I didn't think that was the immediate problem there.

Sara:

No, he's, he's definitely corrupt, but I suspect he's probably a little racist too.

Lilly:

Yeah, probably. But he could be corrupt and not racist. I'm not, I'm not gonna try to defend him. I'm just saying those are different,

Sara:

But my, my point stands how much of Gregory getting in trouble a couple of years ago was because his, his boss is corrupt and racist or just corrupt.

Lilly:

I mean, that is a good point though. You're right. However, just seeing how Hortense operates in this book where she refused to give him any context, that would've been very helpful.

Sara:

I am not trying to defend Ms. Hortens and the way that she treats her nephew. To be clear, I just don't think it's entirely her fault.

Lilly:

No, I, you're right. But as far as framing their relationship goes,

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

She definitely takes advantage of him, and I get like she's doing something important. We, as the reader know that there are real crimes happening in this community. That are unsolved, even if there's an easy patsy to sort of frame for it, and it is worth getting to the bottom of. Absolutely. Use your resources like you have a nephew on the force. Yeah, absolutely. But like, if you're gonna ask him for help because of his, you know, position of power, respect him enough to tell him what the hell is going on.

Sara:

I wonder if there's any aspect of like plausible deniability there so that. That she feels, and this is just speculation, but like maybe she feels that by not giving him information, she is protecting him from his boss in some way.

Lilly:

Possible and I, I do think that's maybe a better argument for the way she treats Blossom, her best friend.

Sara:

It's definitely the reason for her treatment of Blossom, like the, the book Flat Out says that she doesn't wanna tell Blossom stuff because she's worried that Blossom would get herself into trouble.

Lilly:

Which she does. However, blossom only gets herself into trouble because she thinks Ms. Horten's isn't investigating because Ms. Horten's lies and Blossom goes well, someone has to, which is true. But my dear, those are not your skillset.

Sara:

It's true. I

Lilly:

if Ms. Hortenz had been like. I am looking into it go away that I, I would have liked that better, personally

Sara:

I don't think that Blossom would've respected that though.

Lilly:

fair, and she was a little bit of an airhead.

Sara:

Yeah. And not just an airhead, but she also was a bit of a busy body. She needed to get into people's business. So I think that if Ms. Hortenz had told Blossom that she was investigating things. Blossom would've badgered her way into the investigation and it would've been the same outcome.

Lilly:

If Ms had let her, I mean, let's be real. Someone can't badger you without you letting them.

Sara:

It's true.

Lilly:

But anyway we were talking about Gregory, who was the best

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

He. It goes through some shit in this book,

Sara:

I felt so bad for him not just. Because Ms. Hortense is

Lilly:

kind of exploitative.

Sara:

yeah, I was gonna say uses, uses him for his work, but he's got a shitty boss. The community doesn't really like that. He's part of the police. And then we have Sonya who is lodging with Ms. Hortens, who has her own motivations and she tells him things about. His mother that she has overheard and frames it in a way to make it really bad. And she's just doing it because she wants to make Ms. Horten's life a little annoying. But I feel bad for Gregory being stuck in the middle of that.

Lilly:

Oh yeah, absolutely. But standup guy ignores Ms. Hortens for a couple of chapters, which yes,

Sara:

Understandable.

Lilly:

But when she calls him and is like, Hey, shit's really going down though. He shows up. He's not like, everything's fine now. Which again, respect, but he, he comes and he does the necessary policing.

Sara:

Yeah, I actually like that he is still mad.

Lilly:

As he should be.

Sara:

As he should be. But I feel like so often in books that kind of, you know, just gets glossed over.

Lilly:

Yeah, either they're still mad and so therefore they won't help, even though that's awful and stupid. Or because they have to help, suddenly they're not mad anymore. Even though you can like put things aside for a minute and get what needs to get done, done.

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

then when it's over be like, yeah, no, pull the fuck off.

Sara:

It's, it's not one or the other.

Lilly:

Which I think. That complicated emotion and relationship sort of perfectly encapsulates what this book does so well.

Sara:

I, I absolutely think that it's one of Mel Penn's like best skills is just describing those messy relationships.

Lilly:

Mm-hmm. Especially when, you know, in, in some cases, both sides are very justified in being angry. I. Sometimes they're not like, Sonia, what the fuck Sonia?

Sara:

Oh, Sonia. Okay. As much as I loved Gregory, I hated Sonia. She was just so annoying because, so she is mad at Ms. Horten's because she thinks that Ms. Hortens was the partner lady who like did bad things to her family. And it's, she has the wrong person, but she doesn't realize it. And so she gets back at Ms. Horten's by moving in with her, doing lots of little things like smoking when Ms. Horten's asked her not to smoke in the house taking up lots of shelf space, digging up her rose and not admitting to it, throwing out her favorite pot, like just tiny little things. And I'm like, bitch, please.

Lilly:

I, I do wanna push back a little bit because. Was the partner lady for a very long time, and Sonia knew that

Sara:

Right. But, but

Lilly:

interacted when she was little and there's a moment where she's like, I didn't understand what a partner was. I thought you were just stealing our money.

Sara:

yeah, but and maybe this is because I just had trouble with the actual physical format of this book, but I thought that the partner lady at the time. When she was complaining about was actually the, the woman who came after Ms. Warten.

Lilly:

Yes, con Constance, I believe.

Sara:

she is mad at the wrong partner lady like you were, you were correct. I, I get why she thinks that Ms. Wettens is the one, but she's not the, she's has the wrong woman.

Lilly:

But by this point, cor Constance is already dead, so she's like, check. Not, not that Sonya did it, but she's like, all right, one partner lady down, one to go. That's how I interpreted it. Any, I think, I thought she was just mad at the partner as a whole.

Sara:

Oh, I thought she was specifically mad at the partner lady and she went with the one woman that she knew was the partner lady and got it wrong.

Lilly:

But she knew that Constance was the partner lady'cause she went to that address first.

Sara:

That's true, but she only went to that address because she wanted to fuck with Ms. Hutten.

Lilly:

Hmm. I don't think. I don't think, I don't think that's how the beginning of the book presented it. Now, I did read the beginning of the book. That might have also been why I had trouble with names is because I read about half, maybe a third or half of the book, read a different book in between and then finished it, which is a little bit disjointed.

Sara:

It is not the ideal way of reading a book. And it's true, like my, my reading abilities and concentration skills have gone down since I got dumpling because dumpling is a little terror, traumatized terror.

Lilly:

Your new pug that is.

Sara:

yes, my new pug. And it makes it really hard to. Concentrate on reading when you have a traumatized 2-year-old attacking your other pugs.

Lilly:

That's true. This is a book that warrants attention and concentration. This is I not that this is not a popcorn book in that it's not enjoyable and intriguing and like all of the fun things that murder mysteries are, but. Because there are so many different threads happening at once, you do actually need to like devote some some time to it.

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

Speaking of I loved, loved, loved the gather, everyone for the big reveal moment. I know it's a trope, but it's a good one.

Sara:

I, so I didn't, I mean, it was, it was good. I'll, I'll preface this by saying that, but my favorite part about it was not the fact that it happened, but the fact that we finally get someone, when Ms. Tte is giving her speech about, how she knows who the murderer is, and here's who it is, we finally get someone go, actually, I think you are the murderer. I love, like you never see that in things.

Lilly:

Yeah, well that's, that's what I liked so much about this in particular is the way people reacted to it.

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

And at one point she accuses the two women who helped her, like gather everybody. And they were like, what? Wait, that wasn't the plan. And obviously it wasn't them. But she still uses that as a moment to air everyone's dirty laundry, which, sure, I mean they, all of the clues did need to be revealed in order to support her final

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

assertion. But

Sara:

Yeah, it was, it was just a really good scene. And then we have the hairdresser handing out business cards in the middle of it.

Lilly:

Holy shit. So she was just there to provide a piece. It's basically a court scene, right? Like she has everyone with their eyewitness accounts and the various pieces of evidence that they can provide. And by having everyone there in person, they can provide it themselves instead of Ms. Jin's just saying, yeah, they told me this. Totally. Trust me. Believe it. And I, I, I liked that too, right? Because it makes her statements so much more.

Sara:

Credible.

Lilly:

yeah. Credible. Perfect word. And so Bola was there because she had to talk about some piece of gossip that someone said to her that someone else overheard because that was important, So then she hunts the rest of the time just like loving the drama and there's like some earth shattering stuff for these characters happening and being talked about. And then every once in a while we get like a cut Ebola over there like, Ooh, who's gonna throw a punch next?

Sara:

It was so, it was perfect.

Lilly:

Amazing. I loved her. We, that's like the first time we really saw her on the page. We were introduced to the idea that there is a hairdresser in town and. A lot of the characters go to her, but we don't actually see her much until then. And I was like, oh man.

Sara:

Yeah, she's definitely a bit. Character but she shines in this scene.

Lilly:

There was also an incredible twist where Ms. Hortens finds out or finds out a piece of evidence that suggests she might have been wrong about the mystery from the. I'm gonna keep saying the sixties, it spanned like two decades, so it's not, but that's an easier shorthand. I guess I can just say the past,

Sara:

You could just say the past.

Lilly:

the past mystery as opposed to the present mystery. She finds something out that means her conclusion about the past might have been wrong. She had ruled out a suspect based on some information, and then found out that that information was incorrect. And so. The, the young man that she had sort of identified as the culprit and who had been killed. So I guess there was a little bit of vigilantism.

Sara:

I mean, there was definitely some vigilantism because two members of the, of the partner, like they go and kill this man, this boy

Lilly:

fits I thought.

Sara:

no, it's, isn't it Fitz? And, and the um, the friend,

Lilly:

Rols is already dead.

Sara:

I thought Errol died in the fight.

Lilly:

No, no. He's in the hospital during the fight'cause the car crashes happened. Him and Horten's are both in the hospital

Sara:

Oh yeah. You know that's, that's true.

Lilly:

'cause the car crash is how she finds the car or sees the car, which is the final clue that leads her to Danny.

Sara:

yeah, that's true.

Lilly:

So that, and, but they don't take it lightly. Right. That kind of haunts her for years and then when she finds out that she might have been wrong, turns out she wasn't. So that was good,

Sara:

They, yeah, I mean they, they didn't kill an, an innocent, you know, teenager.

Lilly:

but her confidence was shaken. I.

Sara:

yeah. And it does turn out that it was more complex than just Danny, you know, going around attacking these women of his own accord.

Lilly:

Absolutely. I did really like though the not, not reveal, but Hortense having to deal with the fact that she had made an assumption that the person, doing these attacks was obviously a, a man because who? Who else would be so aggressive as to beat these women to death? And then it turns out it was actually a boy. I mean, he was an older teenager, but not the, she says it wasn't the big monstrous shadow she had in her head. Right? So those assumptions had absolutely messed up her investigation. And then it turns out that it was actually a woman behind the whole thing and. I actually was very glad for that. A challenging assumptions is good, and B, ostensibly the attacks had been about adultery. These women were attacked and then given the scripture line, thou shalt not commit adultery. and that was like the only thing they all remembered, except the very first one is a sex worker. And I was like. Why the hell like, aren't the Johns, the ones committing adultery? Not her? What the hell? And misogyny does explain that, but I was still pretty annoyed by it. So to find out that it was actually this other woman who had lost her child and then found out that Pearl, the victim was sort of abandoning her children. Use that sort of as pretext to just be mad at her for anything. I was like, okay, I like that tracks. That feels much better than just attacking a sex worker because of adultery.

Sara:

Yes. Agreed. I, yeah, I, I like, I mean, I can't say that I liked Myrtle's motivations.

Lilly:

Well, Murder's

Sara:

But, well, and to be fair, she didn't actually realize that Danny was the one killing these women initially.

Lilly:

Right.

Sara:

But I, I liked that it was more complex than were led to believe at, at first.

Lilly:

Yes, absolutely. And it ends up being very complex because Right. She was just angry and spewing vitriol at this. Young man who absorbed all of it and so took matters into his own hands.

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

And of course she was happy about it'cause she thought they deserved it. So he got that positive feedback loop.

Sara:

Yeah, it just, I mean, it's a bad situation

Lilly:

Oh yeah. Absolutely. But Hortense figures it out.

Sara:

Hortense does figure it out. I know there is going to be a book two.

Lilly:

the ending, definitely had a hook, and I was like, is that just a cute wink, wink nudge or is that actually a hook for book two? It

Sara:

there, there, is actually going to be a book two and I definitely wanna read book two. Like I, I had fun with this book. I.

Lilly:

I want to reread this book A, to help better absorb some of the character names and B. I don't think this is the type of mystery that you could unravel as you read along some of the clues that she ends up revealing. Like, oh, the, the way the notes were typewritten, the S's were all smudged the same way, so I knew they were on the same typewriter. I don't think that information was in the book,

Sara:

I think that it's going to be a book that you can reread, even though it's a mystery, and obviously you're gonna know who, who done it.

Lilly:

Oh yeah. So the second part of that was I don't think I could have figured it out during my first read based on the clues that the book was giving me. However, I do feel like, I mean, it all fits together so perfectly on a reread. We'll be able to see those threads as they're introduced, and I think that would be a very fun experience.

Sara:

yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fiction Fans.

Lilly:

Come disagree with us. We're on Blue Sky and Instagram at Fiction Fans Pod. You can also email us at Fiction fans pod@gmail.com or leave a comment on YouTube.

Sara:

If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and follow us wherever your podcasts live.

Lilly:

We also have a Patreon where you can support us and find exclusive episodes and a lot of other nonsense.

Sara:

Thanks again for listening, and may your villains always be defeated. Bye.