Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Unfortunately I just lost interest in the premise of this book and so didn’t get around to reading it. Hopefully I’ll pick it up in the future but for now I’m no longer interested.

Couldn’t put it down from start to finish, what a page turner! Ruth Miller moves to Hope House a boarding house for women in New York. As soon as she steps foot in the door she is terrified, but of what? She needs to get out of there but doesn’t even last two days and is found dead in the courtyard. She has no friends or family she’d branded trouble and her death is ruled suicide. So why has the atmosphere changed in Hope House? Why was she so terrified? Enter Mark East to work out what has happened! A book full of suspense... I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen until the final few pages. A very easy and enjoyable read, if you like crime fiction this is for you!

I love this author. Although at first I struggled getting into it, I kept on and am glad I did! Great story. It spurred me on to read her other books and how I wish there were more!

Ruth Miller is looking forward to moving into Hope House, a multi residential property for young women who work in New York. Upon finishing work at Blackman’s department store one night, she goes to the house but when she gets there Ruth is confronted with a voice from the past. The voice belongs to a woman who she fled her home town to get away from, a woman who promised that if she ever saw her again she would kill her........

The Death of a Doll was originally written in 1947 and though in many parts it felt old fashioned and clichéd, it was an interesting view of a bygone time. The story itself was entertaining if somewhat slow going but I think that was because of the age of the book.

Huge thanks to Agora Books and NetGalley for giving me access to this book in exchange for my opinion.

A Fitting Sinister And Tense Air.....
Featuring Mark East, private investigator, and the sometime amateur sleuthing duo Miss Bessy and Miss Beulah. When police are somewhat indifferent towards a death at Hope House, a boarding for women, our sleuthing protagonists are on the case. Fully entertaining murder mystery from the Golden Age with a fitting sinister and tense air throughout the tale but written almost in a cosy vein. Enjoyable with a colourful and quirky cast, clever and well observed. The third in the Mark East mystery series and a worthy reissue from Agora Books.

Death of a Doll was first published in 1947 and has been reissued by Agora Books. Like the British Library Crime Classics, it offers an insight into both the society it portrays, and the history of the genre.

Ruth Miller is excited to be moving into Hope House, a boarding home for young single women in New York City. Two of her friends at the department store where she works live there, and the conditions are much more comfortable than her private rental. However her mood abruptly changes when she arrives to book in at the reception, surrounded by staff and residents. She is terrified for reasons which the reader cannot immediately understand. The next night there is a party at Hope House where the girls and staff dress in identical doll costumes. At the end of the night, Ruth is found dead, having apparently fallen from a window several floors up.

The police consider it a suicide, and there it might have ended, except that one of her well-heeled customers takes an interest. She brings in her friends, an unlikely combination of a private investigator and former police officer called Mark East and two spinster sleuths from New England, Bessy Petty and Beulah Pond, who she invites to visit. (Coming to the novel cold, this feels like an abrupt shift, but this is the third book in the series and earlier books apparently explain how they all came to know each other.) While Mark employs his police contacts and knowhow, the two women have a number of ingenious tricks of their own and between them they work towards a resolution – but not before there are further incidents at the hostel.

This is an odd little book, because of the tension between golden age froth and social realism. On the one hand, you have the investigators, particularly Bessy and Beulah, who treat the death as an amusing puzzle. The mechanics of the mystery are also a bit tedious. They largely concern conflicting accounts of who went up and down in the elevator and when on the night of the party (complicated because they are all wearing basically the same costume). I did zone out at that point. It was confusing at the start because there are a large number of young women all introduced at once, and sometimes they are referred to by their first name and sometimes their last.

However, there is much to enjoy in the book. The characters are all brilliantly drawn. It is packed with fast, often funny dialogue and sharp observation. The novel also offers a fascinating depiction of a particular world – the young women drawn to the city, experiencing independence for the first time and living and working away from their families and community. The relationships between the young women are subtly drawn, their friendships, conflicts and rivalries. It also has a matter-of-fact depiction of a lesbian relationship between two of the senior staff at Hope House.

Death of a Doll is entertaining enough story and if you’re a devotee of the genre it’s an interesting, if at times uneasy, combination of cosy and more psychologically driven mystery.

This was really good crime/mystery with some dark aspects. Although the plot was dated, it was still appealing, though it would not have worked in a modern setting. The author's writing style was enigmatic at times, but I believe this was intended. With many subtle touches and clever turns of phrase that regularly amused me, the logic used in solving the mystery was clear and well constructed. Death of a Doll was a quality piece of writing.

The characters were well drawn by Hilda Lawrence, particularly the refined detective Mark East and his delightfully odd and quirky sidekicks Miss Bessy and Miss Beulah.

This was a marvellously disquieting and scary crime story where I was really rooting for the victim and for the detective and hoping that justice would be done. All in all, an enjoyable, though sinister read and definitely recommended if you enjoy atmospheric period whodunits.

I received a complimentary digital copy of this novel, at my own request, from Agora Books via NetGalley. This review is my own unbiased opinion.

Death of a Doll is the third book in the Mark East series. There are 3 novels in this series.
It is written by an American writer - Hilda Lawrence (1894-1946) and the story takes place in New York.

Ruth Miller works in a department store and one of her customers is the wealthy Roberta. Ruth tells Roberta that she has been lucky to get a room in Hope House ( a home for working girls). She looks forward moving in as it is cheap and include meals. At her arrival se recognise somebody and gets scared. She tries to get away but she doesn’t succeed and is found dead after a fall from the seventh floor. The verdict is suicide but when Roberta hears about it she doesn’t believe it. Her friend private investigator Mark East and two elderly spinsters begin to investigate the death. The two old ladies are an amusing addition and they succeed in finding some clues. Overall the atmosphere is creepy. The murder is loose in Hope House and waiting to strike again.
I found the plot rather improbable, but it was an exciting read.

I tried with this book for a long time, but I just couldn't get into it at all. Just under halfway through, in 6 weeks, I've given up. Parts of it were good and interesting enough to keep me reading, but only for a few chapters at a time. Maybe it's due to the era it was written in, but the sheer volume of characters, all with multiple names, was just too difficult to follow and I couldn't get a sense of any of them.

I may go back and try to finish it one day, but for now, with so many other books to read, it's a DNF I'm afraid.

This is a delight, and a welcome American addition to republished detective stories from the middle of the last century. To be fair, I thought that it moved a little slowly at first, and the number of characters introduced occasionally gets a bit confusing. Having said that, the plot of this moves like something freewheeling down a hill, picking up speed as it goes.
It is evocative of the era, and has plenty of sly humour throughout. I loved this, and look forward to finding more US detective forgotten classics in the future

Ohhh yes this was a good one! At first I was not sure if I would be able to really get into it like I normally do with the novels I read but I am so glad I didn't give up on it! Such a good suspense and thriller read... I highly recommend it!

Sinister and scary.
A really good mystery, with many very dark aspects. The description of boarding houses for single girls in New York in the first half of the twentieth century is very realistic. There is an amazing cast of characters. The death of Ruth Miller is sad and touching, and the villain hard to spot. A really enjoyable but sinister read. Thanks to Crime Classics Review Club for the ARC.

I really enjoyed this story. I am more of an "English Manor House Mystery" reader so this took me out of my element and what a good thing! I love the era (1947) and the plot was really well thought out and written. I couldn't get to the bottom of the mystery until the end and only then because of the denouement. I had the wrong person pegged the whole time, which, I guess was the point. There is suspense interspersed with humor in the persons of the two amateur sleuths, Miss Beulah Pond and Miss Bessy Petty. These are two funny old gals and they are a treat. The characters are well defined and easy to visualize in the mind’s eye, which is so important to making the story come alive. This story will really draw you in. Even if you find it a bit slow in the beginning, hang in there because it most definitely gets better. A page turner for sure.

A new tenant, Ruth Miller arrives to "Hope House" on Friday and is found dead on Sunday. Upon arrival, she is immediately shaken and fearful by someone she notices in the house. Her death is ruled a suicide and when two old spinsters, Miss Belulah & Miss Bessy, who knew Ruth as a salesperson at one of their stores for shopping, become concerned and are not satisfied that it's a suicide, they do a little amateur sleuthing A private eye, Mark Easter is also hired by a friend of Miss Belulah & Miss Bessy, and so the mystery begins.

The characters and the story line at Hope House can be interesting for awhile, but than slowly descends into tedious, repetitious and a distraction from the main focus of the plot. Those characters that are of importance and vital to the story, can be at times overshadowed by characters of little value to the story. I suppose the author was trying to create a wide array of suspects, despite the author already having established a core group of highly possible suspects.

Despite these distractions, I did find this to be an enjoyable read and the process of the investigation is very detailed, which holds the story together and does its best to smooth out some of the inconsistencies. Miss Belulah & Miss Bessy are a rare treat and rather funny at times, as they apply their powers of deduction in between shopping and dining. The slightly humorous insertion into the story, is well placed.

As much as this appears to be a good old fashioned murder mystery, it doesn't quite succeed, but the attempt alone is appealing and noteworthy.

A great story from Hilda. The first one I have read from Hilda Worth a read. Recommended. C wait to read the next one from Crime Classics

A golden age oldie that takes place in Hope House a safe haven at reasonable prices for single women. But the house has a resident who has secrets which to keep hidden might result in murder. A very interesting look at a way of life which no longer exists but which might be a welcome addition today, bring back boarding houses. If your a young reader you may have to Google switchboard.

Agora Books do have a knack of finding books published a long time ago, but which deserve a new audience. Death of a Doll is a good example. First published in 1947, it’s the story of Ruth Miller, a woman who gets a room in a women-only hostel in New York that sounds wonderful. There’s plenty of hot water and meals made by the staff. She works in a department store and is so happy to move to the hostel. She has few friends, one of whom is Mrs Sutton, a wealthy customers who always chats to Ruth when she visits the store.

However, her happiness is short-lived. Within five minutes of entering the hostel, she’s petrified. The assumption is that she’s seen someone who has terrified her – but who is it? Later, there’s a murder. Mrs Sutton asks Mark East to investigate. Her two friends, Miss Beulah and Miss Bessy, who are visiting Mrs Sutton, also decide to investigate. And then there’s a second murder…

Hilda Lawrence (1906 – 1970) used Mark East (and Miss Bessy and Miss Beulah) as series characters. The two ladies bring a lot of humour to the book, with a double-act that is still laugh-out-loud funny today. The dialogue conforms to the stereotype I imagined 1930s hard-boiled American detective stories would be. The author does an excellent job of capturing the atmosphere of 1930s/’40s New York with unwitting history – things she took for granted at the time but which seem historical to us today, e.g. a lift with an operator. I probably wouldn’t have read the book if I’d realised it was American, because I don’t have enough time to read all the British mysteries I’ve collected, but I’m very glad I did. I’ll look out for more Hilda Lawrence – are you listening, Agora? Please?

#DeathOfAdoll #NetGalley

EXCERPT: She went back to the night before, to the afternoon that was just over. She retraced every step. I don't think she knew me at first, she decided. Because of my glasses. I was wearing glasses before. But she knew me this afternoon. Maybe I have a special way of turning my head or using my hands. . . She looked at her hands and saw they were clenched. Maybe I did that this afternoon. Maybe I did that the other time.

She went back to the other time. She saw an office, richly furnished, saw two hatted men with hard eyes, saw another man, hatless, sitting in a leather chair behind an ornate desk. She saw the other girl, her face twisted with fury. She heard the voice again, low and quiet at first, then screaming: 'I'll kill you for this. Someday we'll meet and I'll kill you with my bare hands.'

ABOUT THIS BOOK: Hope House, a New York boarding home for women, has led a rather sleepy existence in terms of emergencies. One wastepaper basket fire surely doesn’t count as a five-alarm fire. That is until new tenant Ruth Miller’s limp and lifeless body is found in the courtyard after plummeting to her death.

In a clandestine and hot-chocolate infused meeting, the heads of the house decide Ruth’s death couldn’t possibly have been foul play: no, she must have fallen or jumped. Shy and mousy, it seems Ruth had no friends to question… or ask uncomfortable questions.

But this was no accident: upon Ruth’s arrival, the atmosphere of this happy house shifted, her paranoia was catching, and her last days were filled with dread. If the heads thought a scandal could be averted, they were wrong. It turns out Ruth did have a friend… and she’s out for justice.

This claustrophobic and tense mystery is heralded as Hilda Lawrence’s best. Equal parts cosy and suspenseful, it’s sure to captivate lovers of all genres of classic crime.

Death of a Doll was first published in 1947 and is the third in the Mark East Series:

Mark East
1. Blood Upon the Snow (1944)
2. A Time to Die (1945)
3. Death of A Doll (1947)

MY THOUGHTS: This book is a bit of a mixed bag of tricks. It brought to mind old movies where the private eye wears a fedora and always has a lit cigarette in his mouth, the women are all dames or dolls, and people have a 'swell' time. In that sense, although Mark East was rather more refined than that, it was very enjoyable. I could see and hear most of this playing out just like one of those old movies, and the dialogue is superb, if occasionally a little hard to follow, but only because our speech has changed greatly in the last seventy years. As has the writing style.

There are some delightfully odd characters to enjoy, Bessy and Beulah, for example. Mark East says of them, 'With his own eyes he had seen them find needles in haystacks and thread them with camels'.
Two ladies of indeterminate age, independently wealthy (I should imagine that ten thousand a year was a great deal back then), and who don't mind a tipple or two, they provide a great deal of color.

The plot is dated, but perhaps all the more appealing because of that. It would not work in a modern setting where young working women no longer live in heavily chaperoned boarding houses, required to sign in and out if going anywhere other than work. It brought to mind living in the nurses home when I started my training. We were all required to 'live in' for our first year. But back to the plot - I got a little lost once or twice and had to retrace my steps to see if I had missed something. But no, it is just the writing style, deliberately obscure at times.

All in all, an enjoyable read, and definitely recommended if you enjoy atmospheric period 'whodunnits'. But I would also recommend that you read this series from the beginning to get a better knowledge of the main characters.

😊😊😊.5

THE AUTHOR: Hilda Lawrence was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1894. An avid reader of crime fiction, she wrote her first novel, Blood upon the Snow, in 1946. The novel introduced her three main series characters: Manhattan private investigator Mark East and sleuthing New England spinsters Miss Beulah and Miss Bessy. By combining these characters Hilda Lawrence's novels are a clever mixture of the hardboiled and softboiled styles of detective fiction. Hilda Lawrence wrote only four novels, all in the 1940s. Death of a Doll, which was published in 1947, is considered her masterpiece. She died in Manhattan, New York, in 1976.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Agora Books via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Death of a Doll by Hilda Lawrence for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

Please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com for an explanation of my rating system. This review and others are also published on my webpage https://sandysbookaday.wordpress.com/...

Hilda Lawrence was an American crime author best known for her series of novels featuring the private investigator Mark East, published during the 1940s. This one from 1947, Death of a Doll, is the third in the series and has been reissued this month by Agora Books. Lawrence is one of several ‘forgotten’ or lesser known crime writers to be brought back into print by various publishers recently; sometimes it’s easy to see why an author’s books have been allowed to fade into obscurity, but I was very pleasantly surprised by this one and am hoping the rest of the Mark East series will be made available again too.

The story is set in and around Hope House, a home for young women in New York City run by Monica Brady and her assistant Angelina Small. The home provides seventy girls with a safe refuge where, for a small fee, they can have a bed, hot water, two meals a day and the opportunity to make new friends. At the beginning of the novel we meet Ruth Miller, a woman in her twenties who works in Blackmans department store and who is excitedly telling her regular customer, Roberta Sutton, that she has been offered a place at Hope House. We don’t know why Ruth has found herself with nowhere else to go and nobody to turn to, but she gives the reader a hint that there has been some sort of trouble in her past. Later that day, we see her arriving at her new home, suitcase in hand, full of optimism for the future.

Two days later, Ruth is dead, having fallen from a window on the seventh floor of Hope House during a party at which all of the girls were dressed in rag doll costumes. Suicide is assumed, but Roberta is not convinced. Why would Ruth have killed herself just as her life was beginning to improve? What the reader knows, but the characters don’t – although some of them suspect – is that during those few days at Hope House, Ruth came face to face with someone from the past…but who was it and how could this have led to her death?

Roberta calls in her private investigator friend, Mark East, who arrives in New York accompanied by two more amateur detectives, the elderly spinsters Miss Beulah and Miss Bessy. It’s going to be difficult to know where to start – there’s so little known about Ruth and her background, and the fact that all of the girls were dressed in identical doll costumes on the night of her death doesn’t help – but surely between the three of them they can solve the mystery?

I really enjoyed this book. Although the story is slow to unfold – a lot of time is spent on exploring the relationships between the various girls and employees at Hope House – I still found it difficult to put down. I didn’t guess the culprit correctly, but felt as though I probably should have done! I did suspect almost all of the ‘dolls’ at one point or another, constantly changing my mind as more information was revealed. The setting is wonderful too; I could vividly picture the interior of Hope House, with Kitty answering the phones on the switchboard, Jewel operating the elevator, and Miss Brady and Miss Small seeing that everything ran smoothly, while making ambitious plans for the future.

My only problem with the book was that I felt there were too many characters and that we saw things from too many different viewpoints. I’m not sure whether we really needed three detectives either. I think Beulah and Bessy were probably included to lighten the mood and provide some comedy, but they didn’t add much to the story in my opinion and I would have preferred to have spent more time following Mark’s investigations instead. Otherwise, this was a great first introduction to Hilda Lawrence’s work and an unusual combination of the cosy and the dark and suspenseful.