Library Journal
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[DEBUT] Forget everything you think you know about London in the Swinging Sixties: the sharp-as-a-tack Carnaby Street fashion, the louche Soho hot spots, the chirpings of the early Beatles. This literary, and timely, mystery is all about that period's gray, sodden underbelly. American star Iolanthe "Lanny" Green gains fame on the West End stage in a play titled The Field of Stars. When she goes missing, DS Barnaby Hayes is assigned the case. At the same time, Lanny's theatrical dresser Miss Anna Treadway pursues her own investigation, sometimes in tandem with Hayes and sometimes not. They discover London even then was a congregation of outsiders. Homosexuals were hounded and subject to blackmail. Muslims were terrorized, abortions were back-alley affairs, and Aloysius, Miss Treadway's endearing helpmate in her quest, arrived in London from Jamaica expecting to shine in an Evelyn Waugh world only to bump up against police brutality. Verdict There's more sociology than sociopaths in this first novel by a writer (Fragrant Heart) who has done many literary adaptations for the BBC, and it will find an appreciative audience among those looking less for a slew of suspects and more for a cuddle of engaging eccentrics.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

When Iolanthe Green, an American actress on the London stage, disappears, her dresser, Anna Treadway, is plunged into an underworld of nightclubs and illegal solutions to problem pregnancies. She is aided in her search for Iolanthe by Jamaican Aloysius Weathers, an accountant at one of the clubs. The police are also involved, in the person of Detective Sergeant Barnaby Hayes. To get ahead on the force, Hayes has worked hard to erase all traces of his Irishness; nearly every character in Emmerson's atmospheric debut has come to 1960s London to find a new life and, in some cases, a new version of self. Aloysius, for example, willed himself to England and into the life of a middle-class gentleman only to find that being black comes with its own entrapments. Iolanthe has tried to escape from her past by inventing a new history for herself. And Anna has secrets of her own. The hunt for Iolanthe unfolds over a few days, but backstories are revealed by frequent forays back in time, a narrative strategy that slows the momentum but helps to deepen the characters.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2017 Booklist