Rachel McMillan. Murder in the City of Liberty. Nelson, 2019.

The attractive cover and promise of a mystery set in Boston caught my attention. There are really two main plots in Murder in the City of Liberty. There is a criminal enterprise which does result in a murder about halfway through the story. There is also a love triangle. Will Jane go with St. John or Rochester, I mean, will Regina (“Reggie”) go for Hamish or Vaughan?

Reggie Van Buren and Hamish DeLuca are partners in a detective agency in the North End of Boston in 1940. There are numerous allusions to The Thin Man films with Dick Powell and Myrna Loy. Reggie is upper crust from Connecticut. While Hamish’s father is a quite successful newspaper editor, his father’s family immigrated to Canada shortly before World War I. Since the early 1900s, the North End has been primarily an Italian neighborhood.

There is one unclear reference not explained in this story. DeLuca is normally an Italian name, and Nick has a cousin who is clearly Italian, but his father was registered in Canada as an enemy alien during World War I, but Italy fought with the Allies in the Great War. (Italy’s historical traditional enemy was Austria.) It is conceivable they came from Austria or the Balkans, but this seems a little odd.

The action starts immediately. Like films that start in medias res, it is not exactly clear what is happening but Hamish is attacked and Regina is left for dead. Hamish was supposed to meet a potential client, but whenever he talks to him on the phone afterward, the client hangs up without answering Hamish’s questions. And it seems like everyone is involved in some way in a plan to develop a waterfront apartment complex on land that may be more like the sinking sand from Jesus’ parable.

Van Buren and DeLuca get another client, one Errol Parker, a black baseball player signed by the Red Sox and playing for their local minor league team. Fans call him Robin Hood because he steals bases expertly. But he is being harassed in a much more serious way than a rookie would expect. We know it is because of his race, but this is 1940, and there are some pro-Nazi agitators who want the U.S. to stay out of the wars in Europe and Asia antagonizing both blacks and Jews.

Hamish’s best friend Nate is Jewish, and as they investigate both the construction project and Errol’s problem, Nate, Reggie, and Hamish all end up in trouble. To tell who is murdered would be something of a spoiler because the murder does not happen until nearly halfway through the story, and the policeman in charge of the investigation says it was not a murder.

Through all this there is the back-and-forth wavering of Regina trying to decide whom she really loves. Is it Vaughan, a family favorite and old friend, whose business can also help Mr. Van Buren’s business? Or is it her partner, Hamish, whose family is also highly esteemed in his home city but not in America?

There is also Hamish’s Chicago cousin, Luca Valeri, who left Hamish after Hamish was shot in a nightclub in the first story in the series, but who seems to have a lot of elliptical connections. Why did Luca’s former associate suddenly appear in that opening scene? Can Hamish forgive Cousin Luca for abandoning him at the club? And why is Errol’s teenaged nephew running errands for him out of the Parker House?

For the most part, McMillan gets a nice sense of Boston in the forties. I recall my father describing Scollay Square (now gone to make way for Government Center) the way she describes it. There are a few anachronisms, but they do not take away from the overall story. Sadly, the real Red Sox would not have signed a black player in 1940. The owner back then was notoriously prejudiced, and the Sox were actually the last major league team at the time to have a black player on their roster (Pumpsie Green in 1959).