Death of Riley by Rhys Bowen
The second of Rhys Bowen’s Molly Murphy mysteries, set in turn of the century New York City, continues to explore the social issues surrounding Irish immigrants and the New York gangs and police, and also introduces other social sects.
Much of the early book chronicles Molly’s attempts to get a job at least half-worthy of her education. Born an Irish peasant, Molly was educated alongside the children of the local English landowners after catching the attention of the landowner as a child. As a result, she is too educated for the typical labor available to Irish immigrants, but does not have the money or possessions needed to acquire a more suitable job. Early in the book, she gets a job as a Lady’s Companion with the help of her friend, Daniel Sullivan, but is forced to leave that job for certain spoilery reasons I’ll get to in a moment. (Because they annoy me.)
Soon after, she deduces that Paddy Riley, a man she’s seen spying around and masquerading as a photographer is a private investigator, and she tries to convince him to take her on as an apprentice. Riley being an old fashioned man in 1901, this doesn’t go the way she wants, but her persistence eventually gets her a job cleaning his office. Things change, however, when Riley is killed, and Molly decides to try to run the business on her own and solve his death.
This eventually leads to Molly falling in with a Bohemian set of artists and writers, particularly Sid and Gus, a lesbian, pants-wearing couple who takes Molly in as if she were a stray kitten they just had to keep. Not, mind you, that Molly realized just what kind of “friends” they are until another friend clues her in about his own lifestyle. Though there’s part of this that I had a little trouble buying into, Molly’s getting sucked into this set and learning about it was the highlight of the book. Like the first book in the series, Death of Riley is more concerned about characterization and the life and society of 1901 New York than it is with the mystery. I have no problems with this.
I do, however, have problems with the romantic manipulations in the book (yes, manipulations, not complications, because of the form they take), because they hit two of my pet peeves. First of all, there’s the introduction of the love triangle. With the fiance who, naturally, will make Daniel’s life miserable if he tries to cry off. If you’ve been here long, you know that a lot of my pure and unbridled hatred for love triangles is that the second male is usually likable, nice and sympathetic (or darker and interesting-the point is, a character we’re meant to like) and the second female is greedy and jealous and we’re meant to hate her.
The other pet peeve? That Daniel deliberately kept his engagement a secret. There is a reason Rochester is one of my most despised fictional characters ever. Daniel may not have been trying to trick the woman he claimed to love into becoming his mistress while pretending to make her his wife while he kept his real wife locked up in the attic, with only an alcoholic to take care of her, but he still led Molly on. He may not have said he wanted to marry her, but his actions led her on, and there’s no way he couldn’t have known how she would react when she found or, or that he could have thought she wouldn’t mind.
With a lesser book, or if Molly hadn’t made it clear that she wasn’t going to be involved with him while he was engaged, I might have thrown something. As it is, I’m still with the series (it helps that I was, at best, neutral about Daniel as it was) but not pleased that Daniel is still clearly Molly’s love interest. There aren’t many ways to “complicate” a romance that will annoy me more than here, save for more extreme versions of both of these.
Much of the early book chronicles Molly’s attempts to get a job at least half-worthy of her education. Born an Irish peasant, Molly was educated alongside the children of the local English landowners after catching the attention of the landowner as a child. As a result, she is too educated for the typical labor available to Irish immigrants, but does not have the money or possessions needed to acquire a more suitable job. Early in the book, she gets a job as a Lady’s Companion with the help of her friend, Daniel Sullivan, but is forced to leave that job for certain spoilery reasons I’ll get to in a moment. (Because they annoy me.)
Soon after, she deduces that Paddy Riley, a man she’s seen spying around and masquerading as a photographer is a private investigator, and she tries to convince him to take her on as an apprentice. Riley being an old fashioned man in 1901, this doesn’t go the way she wants, but her persistence eventually gets her a job cleaning his office. Things change, however, when Riley is killed, and Molly decides to try to run the business on her own and solve his death.
This eventually leads to Molly falling in with a Bohemian set of artists and writers, particularly Sid and Gus, a lesbian, pants-wearing couple who takes Molly in as if she were a stray kitten they just had to keep. Not, mind you, that Molly realized just what kind of “friends” they are until another friend clues her in about his own lifestyle. Though there’s part of this that I had a little trouble buying into, Molly’s getting sucked into this set and learning about it was the highlight of the book. Like the first book in the series, Death of Riley is more concerned about characterization and the life and society of 1901 New York than it is with the mystery. I have no problems with this.
I do, however, have problems with the romantic manipulations in the book (yes, manipulations, not complications, because of the form they take), because they hit two of my pet peeves. First of all, there’s the introduction of the love triangle. With the fiance who, naturally, will make Daniel’s life miserable if he tries to cry off. If you’ve been here long, you know that a lot of my pure and unbridled hatred for love triangles is that the second male is usually likable, nice and sympathetic (or darker and interesting-the point is, a character we’re meant to like) and the second female is greedy and jealous and we’re meant to hate her.
The other pet peeve? That Daniel deliberately kept his engagement a secret. There is a reason Rochester is one of my most despised fictional characters ever. Daniel may not have been trying to trick the woman he claimed to love into becoming his mistress while pretending to make her his wife while he kept his real wife locked up in the attic, with only an alcoholic to take care of her, but he still led Molly on. He may not have said he wanted to marry her, but his actions led her on, and there’s no way he couldn’t have known how she would react when she found or, or that he could have thought she wouldn’t mind.
With a lesser book, or if Molly hadn’t made it clear that she wasn’t going to be involved with him while he was engaged, I might have thrown something. As it is, I’m still with the series (it helps that I was, at best, neutral about Daniel as it was) but not pleased that Daniel is still clearly Molly’s love interest. There aren’t many ways to “complicate” a romance that will annoy me more than here, save for more extreme versions of both of these.