Cafe Europa

March 2, 2015
Set in 1914, Ifkovic’s so-so sixth Edna Ferber mystery (after 2014’s Final Curtain) takes the bestselling writer to Budapest, in the company of Winifred Moss, a British suffragette. The pair stay at a shabby hotel, the Árpád, where Edna can’t resist scrutinizing the other guests. She sees that Cassandra Blaine, a wealthy young American woman about to be forced into marriage with a European
aristocrat, is not just spoiled but terrified; Cassandra’s murder sets Edna off to find the killer among the eccentric, suspicious characters hanging around the Árpád.
The proceedings are enlivened by the antics of Harold Gibbon—an obnoxious but plucky reporter for Hearst’s sensational newspapers—but slowed down by excessive detail about what Edna and Winifred are seeing and eating. The feverish, doomed-operetta atmosphere is relevant, since Europe is on the brink of WWI. That the solution to the mystery relies heavily on international politics, however, diminishes Edna’s personal investigation.

March 1, 2015
Edna Ferber's sixth case takes her back in time to a cosmopolitan city and a late-night murder.Two years after the Titanic disaster, reporter/author Ferber travels to her father's homeland of Hungary. In Budapest, she and her suffragist friend Winifred Moss take rooms in the shabby Arpad Hotel, where the electricity is capricious and a portrait of the Emperor Franz Josef covers the dumbwaiter in every room. The heart of the hotel is the Cafe Europa, a center for gossip, intrigue, and front-page news, at least according to Harold Gibbon, a journalist for the Hearst syndicate. The ferretlike reporter wants to write a book about the decline and fall of the Austrian Empire and sees no better symbol for it than the upcoming marriage of the beautiful but gauche American heiress Cassandra Blaine to an impoverished, second-rate Austrian count. Winifred thinks empty-headed Cassandra laughs too loudly and defeats the cause of women's rights. But Edna sees that the laughter covers up heartbreak: Cassandra's in love with Endre Molnar, who's from an old Hungarian family that isn't noble enough to tempt Cassandra's social-climbing mother. And the Blaine fortune, which comes from American-manufactured firearms, is all that interests her cold, unattractive fiance. Then Cassandra confides in Edna that she heard something she didn't understand, and she's afraid. Before Edna can decide how to help, Cassandra gets a note from Molnar to meet him in the garden, where she's stabbed to death. Her Hungarian lover is the top suspect, but Edna and Gibbon think that the murderer could as easily be a fading singer who helped arrange the marriage, a failed poet, or a sinister American businessman who seems to be everywhere watching everyone. Gibbon thinks he has the answer, but it falls to Edna, with the help of two Hungarian artists, to find the missing piece to the puzzle. Apart from one gratingly predictable plot twist, Ifkovic (Final Curtain, 2014, etc.) successfully blends homicide with a loving homage to Budapest on the eve of World War I.

April 15, 2015
The year is 1914. Edna Ferber, a newspaper reporter and short-story writer who has published a few books of relatively little note, is touring Europe. In Budapest, Edna becomes fascinated by the story of a young woman who was murdered by a former lover, or so the story goes. Edna believes the man is innocent and is determined to help him, but she can't begin to imagine what secrets she might uncover. The sixth in the Ferber series is, chronologically, the second Ferber mystery; it falls between the second book, Escape Artist (2011), set in 1904 when Ferber was a young reporter, and the fourth, Downtown Strut (2013), set in 1927 just after she won the Pulitzer Prize (the author, as series fans know, likes to jump around in time). It's as smartly written as its predecessors, but, as each book does, it shows us a slightly different Ferberhere, she's not quite a girl anymore, but neither is she the experienced woman we see in other series installments. Another totally successful entry in a consistently interesting series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)