Kensington
Published September 30, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Virginia Abrams has a confession to make, though she’s not seeking absolution from the stern figure on the other side of the confessional. She has sought out Monsignor Mundy, a doppelganger for the real-life racist demagogue Father Coughlin, hoping to convince him to intercede on her behalf to the powerful Senator Ronald Callahan for financial support for her pregnancy. She’s determined to keep the child she’s carrying even though the father, the Senator’s son, raped her. It’s 1943 and the Monsignor is not sympathetic, nor apparently is the Senator. After her attempt to get a small amount of money to cover expenses for the child’s birth, a man arrives at the law office where she works to take her to a private doctor, though it turns out he’s taking her to a back-alley abortionist. She only escapes by slashing him with a scalpel.
Realizing the powerful senator will do anything to silence her, she flees to Seattle where a kindly woman on the train has given her a lead on an apartment. Soon she’s settled with an assumed name and a lucky position as a typist for a reclusive mystery writer. But violence is never far away, and soon she’s involved in a real murder mystery right outside her window. A woman who looks remarkably like her has died on a steep staircase beside their apartment complex, and Virginia can’t help but wonder if it was actually she who was supposed to die.
The woman’s young son, Tim, is convinced his mother was murdered and is also suspicious of the random strangers who stay at one of the apartments, a varied group of secretive visitors who he suspects are Nazi spies. And then other residents of the apartments begin to suffer fatal accidents. While the police seem baffled and reluctant to draw conclusions, the mysteriously reclusive writer whose manuscripts Virginia types becomes interested in the puzzle.
Kevin O’Brien has skillfully woven a plot with enough of the historical setting to give readers a sense of the past without overwhelming them with details. For suspense, he draws on the often-forgotten pro-fascist movement in the U.S., paired with the threat to Virginia from a senator who wants her silenced. Overall, it’s an entertaining historical mystery with cozy elements and touches of a 1940s spy thriller, an appealing heroine up against steep odds, and a comforting resolution of all the loose threads in the end.