From Publishers Weekly:

"Great expectations have been fulfilled! The second book in Pall’s Nine muses series, this one inspired by Erato, the muse of love poetry, and again starring New York romance writer Juliet Bodine, is sure to please fans of Corpse de Ballet (2001). Ada Case Caffrey, a spry octogenarian who enjoys reading her own erotic verse at poetry slams, shows Juliet some recently discovered manuscript pages from the memoirs of Regency London’s most infamous courtesan, Harriette Wilson. The sheets contain a hitherto unknown couplet attributed to Byron. Juliet refers Ada to Dennis Daignault, a rare books dealer whom she has been dating. But Ada never returns from her meeting with Dennis, and Juliet files a missing persons report. When Ada turns up strangled and stuffed under a car on Riverside Drive, Juliet finds herself a likely suspect in a homicide investigation. Despite the erotic theme, nothing here would make a maiden aunt blush. Pitch-perfect dialogue furthers the wonderfully intricate plot. Juliet’s recollections of her first conversation with Ada, and of Ada’s verses, lead to the dramatic denouement to a fully satisfying mystery." (Apr. 7) - February 24, 2003


"Slam Dunk" from The Washington Post

"Mystery reviewers, like other readers, sometimes check out jacket blurbs when deciding which new books to take on. Blurbs alone aren't make-or-break -- they get maybe 25 points on the University of Michigan admissions scale -- but they can spur a reviewer on to a closer look and, on rare occasions, lead to a "not to my taste" instant rejection.

Mistakes can be made. I set aside Slightly Abridged (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) when I noted that author Ellen Pall's first mystery, Corpse de Ballet, had been praised by just two publications, and one was Romantic Times. Not for me, I thought.

Wrong. A second look -- which came when the early chapters of a crime-fiction bigfoot's new work proved disappointing -- got me hooked right away on a delightful new series by a writer who comes across as a sort of sprightly Ruth Rendell. Pall may have been noticed by Romantic Times because her amateur sleuth, Juliet Bodine, is a popular writer of Regency romances. There's nothing either gauzy or overwrought about Bodine herself, however; she is a witty, canny young New Yorker whose involvements with men are entirely and rather sweetly up-to-date.

Working under her pseudonym, Angelica Kestrel-Haven, on "A Christian Gentleman," Bodine is caught in a no-inspiration funk, and she is blocked. She is afraid she might even have to quit writing and "find a job teaching English literature, probably at some small college with a sense of humor." Then Ada Case Caffrey arrives. She is an 84-year-old fan from upstate New York who wants Bodine's help with appraising and possibly selling a manuscript fragment found in a secret compartment in a bedpost. The author of the pages appears to be Harriette Wilson, a Regency-era courtesan with a taste for extortion and connections to Lord Byron, whose verse to her she quotes in the unearthed memoir section.

Imperious and manipulative, Caffrey is a funny, self-dramatizing old bohemian who takes the New York downtown poetry-slam scene by storm with her erotic verses -- until, that is, she turns up strangled in a garbage bag along Riverside Drive, her manuscript gone. Caffrey was such a wonderfully insufferable piece of work that her death jars Bodine out of her blank-page panic and also recharges her off-again-on-again, sort-of romance with NYPD detective Murray Landis.

Both New Yorkers to the bone, Bodine and Landis are amusingly out of their element when the murder investigation takes them to the Adirondacks hamlet where Caffrey was involved with both a theatrical group, the Adirondactors, and radical environmentalists. The variegated range of suspects in New York and Espyville is to Bodine like "a Chinese finger puzzle, one of those tubes of braided straw that constrict more tightly around one's fingers the more one pulls away. The only route of escape was to move into the puzzle, deeper into the trap. Like turning into a skid. Or developing a character." - by Richard Lipez © 2003 The Washington Post Company