Perfect for readers who love a historical fiction feel with a true mystery at its core, John Copenhaver’s The Savage Kind is a beautiful homage to film noir and an intricately woven tale of murder, secrets, jealousy, and everything we love to find in traditional mysteries.
Set in the 1940’s in Washington DC, two young teenage girls meet when one’s family moves to town. They form a bond that runs perhaps deeper than they, at first, know how to handle. The two girls, Judy and Phillipa bond over a love of literature and a fondness for their literature teacher, who encourages the girls’ minds likely more than would have been expected for girls in the 1940s. The fact that they have a mutual love and appreciation for all things dark and twisty may concern the reader, but does not phase the much-adored Miss Martins.
There is suddenly a drastic change in their teacher, however, and a student in their class is missing and then found murdered. Judy and Phillipa believe they have the skills and the knowledge to solve the puzzle behind these mysterious events, but they encounter a web much darker and more tangled than they could possibly have been prepared for.
Told through alternating points of view between the two girls, their journal and diary entries give the reader insight into the events as each girl saw them, as well as what each was thinking at the time—things that they might never have actually said out loud. Their relationship is reminiscent at times of the Parker-Hulme murder case, on which the film Heavenly Creatures was based, so it does not take long for the reader to begin to wonder (and worry) about whether the bond they have formed is bringing out the best in the girls, or perhaps the worst.
Tightly-woven, multi-layered, and beautifully written, The Savage Kind will be a treat for mystery lovers, and will thrill fans of Copenhaver’s multiple award winning debut novel, Dodging and Burning.
The Savage Kind is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
Will you be picking up The Savage Kind? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Two lonely teenage girls in 1940s Washington, DC, discover they have a penchant for solving crimes—and an even greater desire to commit them—in the new mystery novel by Macavity Award-winning novelist John Copenhaver.
Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled seventeen-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction.
When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows. Frightened, Philippa flees, unsure who the man is or what she’s seen. Days later, her teacher returns to school altered: a dark shell of herself. On the heels of her teacher’s transformation, a classmate is found dead in the Anacostia River—murdered—the body stripped and defiled with a mysterious inscription.
As the girls follow the clues and wrestle with newfound feelings toward each other, they suspect that the killer is closer to their circle than they imagined—and that the greatest threat they face may not be lurking in the halls at school, or in the city streets, but creeping out from a murderous impulse of their own.
