She sighed and let her fingertip run over the chemical formula for cyanide. By God, it was a thing of beauty and simplicity. One nitrogen and one carbon atom married together with three bonds. Not one, not two. Cyanide demanded a trifecta of irresistible gravities. Such a thing of dark beauty created from the basic matter of life present in all living creatures. [p. 36]
Murder mystery set in New York in 1918, near the end of the First World War and at the beginning of the Spanish Flu. The story opens at a party celebrating the engagement of Allene Cutter to wealthy, brash Andrew Smythe Biddle. The glitterati of the Gilded Age are in attendance; and so are Allene's childhood friends, Jasper Jones (dropped by the Cutters when his family lost their money) and Birdie Dreyer (dropped by the Cutters due to some secret scandal involving her mother, formerly Mrs Cutter's companion). Allene is a chemistry nerd; Birdie works in a factory painting watch dials; Jasper is a hospital janitor, trying to save enough to take medical exams. When one of the guests, gossipy socialite Florence Waxworth, falls to her death on the staircase, it quickly becomes clear to the three friends that this was no accident. But who left the note -- 'You're Welcome' -- in Allene's chemistry book?
This was a good, well-constructed whodunnit: my guesses as to the identity of the murderer were all wrong! Kang's depiction of the class-based tensions between the three young protagonists, each trapped by circumstance and constrained by family, was well-executed and compelling. I was pleased that some class barriers weren't overcome: that, though justice was served in a sense, the old inequalities persisted. Impressively, despite each of the protagonists carrying some of the narrative, there were still surprises at the climax of the novel -- and that those surprises did not feel forced or dishonest: no sleight of hand here.
I acquired this book in 2017 and I don't recall there being much emphasis, in the promotional material, on the role of the Spanish Flu. It's barely mentioned in the first two-thirds of the novel, though after that it becomes an overwhelming and cataclysmic element of the plot. At least the flu, unlike Birdie's mystery illness -- radium poisoning, which the author notes in the Afterword wasn't really understood until the 1920s -- was recognised by those exposed to it.
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