Murder Me Now

The period details of New York's Greenwich Village in 1920 are just about perfect in Meyers's second book (after 1999's Free Love) about bohemian poet Olivia Brown. Scenes studded with real people like writer/editor Edmund ""Bunny"" Wilson and gangster Monk Eastman are as sharp and intoxicating as the bootleg gin that Brown and her cohorts swill almost continuously. Time and place leap to life as we move through a wintry landscape of rehearsals at the Provincetown Playhouse, drunken house parties in Croton, intrigue at the Yale Club and endless gatherings at famous restaurants like Chumley's. Brown, who narrates, is a fascinating character, managing to produce excellent poetry reminiscent of Edna St. Vincent Millay while drinking and smoking up a storm, attracting the sexual advances of both sexes (not for nothing is she called ""Oliver"" by her friends) and putting herself in harm's way by helping her downstairs neighbor, PI Harry Melville, investigate crimes. And if the crime hereDthe murder of a wealthy family's young nanny, who might have once been a Pinkerton agent with possible connections to the Secret Service and the Black HandDturns out to be the least interesting part of the book, that seems a small price to pay for being allowed into the author's elegant historical recreation. Agent, Stuart Krichevsky. Mystery Guild featured alternate. (Jan.)