Last summer, I wrote about Stefanie Pintoff‘s first novel, In the Shadow of Gotham, a piece of historical detective fiction, set in New York in the aftermath of the General Slocum disaster in 1904. I found the novel immensely satisfying both as a piece of historical fiction and as an intricate detective novel, so I was pleased to see its protagonist, the police detective Simon Ziele, returning this summer in Pintoff’s new novel, A Curtain Falls. Published earlier this month, A Curtain Falls tracks Ziele’s attempts to unravel the case of a serial killer who preys on actresses. Ziele is once again paired up with the academic criminologist Alistair Sinclair, allowing Pintoff to both explore the back alleys of old New York and the origins of the discipline of criminology.

It’s next on my summer reading list, so I’ll be beaming it to my Kindle in a day or two.