Viking
Published April 1, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Greta is delighted to put her stifling finishing school behind her and return to her brother’s Long Island estate, where she hopes to relax and sink into some good books. That proves a bit difficult when she finds guests staying there. Tom is an overbearing bear of a man who spars with Greta’s brother Jay, rubbing in his status as a man with a vast amount of inherited wealth. She’s thrilled to see the charming Nick is among the visitors, but he has eyes for a professional golfer who is far more sophisticated and beguiling than Greta. Her brother is a generous host who loves beautiful things and hosting wild parties, but has never quite escaped the hardscrabble past he and his sister endured before he made his fortune. And he clearly is hopelessly in love with Tom’s wife.
Then Tom is found dead with a pistol beside him. Why would a man who seemed to have it all commit suicide? Or was it murder? The police think it’s an open and shut case that they would like to keep quiet, but Greta is determined to get to the bottom of it.
Anderson-Wheeler has borrowed the setting and characters of a novel familiar to many a former high school student, The Great Gatsby, giving Jay Gatsby a sister, changing who gets murdered and why, and adding a cozy murder investigation by an amateur sleuth who has anachronistic attitudes toward race and gender. It may be generously seen as an attempt to subvert a classic text, but it dwells more on how the young protagonist will overcome the challenges of a challenging investigation than on the careless violence of wealth or the contrast between the hedonistic indulgence of the rich and the squalid lives of the poor. These issues are nodded at from time to time but they don’t drive the narrative. Though the household servants are given some agency, there is no Valley of Ashes on the way to West Egg.
If you’re looking for a commentary on a novel that found its way onto countless high school reading lists, this mystery does little to embellish its themes (even though it is more than three times the original’s slim length). As a cozy mystery, it aspires to be more Christie than Fitzgerald. If that’s what a reader is looking for, it will happily fit the bill.