Fortune Favors the Dead is the first of a five-book (so far) series regarding the detective team of Lillian Pentecost and Will Parker. I’ve already reviewed books two and three and I wish I had read them in the order that they were published. The books do work as stand-alone novels, but if you don’t read them in order, then you would miss some of the character development that the author, Stephen Spotswood has written so skillfully. This book introduces the primary characters and gives the history of their lives before they teamed up, and there’s a quick review of some of the cases that they solved in the three years since they met. Pentecost is the wise detective who is widely recognized as the best detective in NYC if not the whole world, and Parker is her talented protégé. However, this story centers in Chicago and takes place in 1945.
This story involves two construction companies that have been rivals for more than 100 years, and under suspect circumstances, one of them has consistently underbid and won the major construction projects while the other has played second fiddle to the biggest deals. It was during a current major dig that a body was discovered, a man who had been the founder of the second-fiddle company. He was thought to have perished in the 1871 fire that devastated the city, The Great Chicago Fire, but his body was never recovered. Now, it looked as if the fire had not killed him, but that he was murdered and his body had been hidden. Meanwhile, more murders happened involving the two families who had been feuding with each other since the two companies had been founded.
Spotswood has developed fascinating characters including the unlikely pairing of Pentecost and Parker. It’s a great plot and I certainly did not see the very late twist that changed the perspective that these two females sleuths had uncovered over the course of the book. This novel gets my highest recommendation.
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