The Night in Question

April 1, 2023
Inseparable teen sleuths snark and squabble their way through a second whodunit infused with the spirit of the Queen of Mystery. "This is what happens when you start messing around with history," someone comments. "The bones begin to rattle." In this follow-up to The Agathas (2022), the principle definitely holds. Investigating a brutal assault that leaves a widely disliked classmate in a medical coma leads unlikely friends Alice and Iris to the mysterious deaths of a budding starlet and her secret beau 74 years ago, in 1949. Along with paying frequent homage to Agatha Christie and lavishing their tale with tried-and-true elements--an old mansion with a secret staircase and a hidden room, a fabulously valuable missing necklace, an apparent perp who may be innocent despite being caught literally red-handed, shadowy family connections, and more--the authors enthusiastically shovel clues, or things that look like clues, into nearly every one of their short, alternately narrated chapters on the way to a violent climax. In a strong continuing subplot, the friendship between the two teenagers sometimes looks more like war as they come from different social circles (wealthy Alice's dubbed the Mains, working-class Iris' the Zoners) in a similarly divided small California town, and as they wrestle with individual personal issues, their characters, values, and expectations also frequently clash. They're talented detectives though, with ingeniously complementary methods. The main cast reads White. A delight for teen Poirots, chock-full of puzzling clues and swirling tensions. (map) (Mystery. 14-18)

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