Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Bluff by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Jane Stanton Hitchcock was initially a playwright and screenwriter, and then she turned to crime fiction writing. She is also an avid poker player who competes in the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker. Her expertise in poker has a prominent place in her sixth crime story, Bluff (Poisoned Pen Press, 2019).

Maud Warner, born in New York to a wealthy family, wants revenge on the man who stole her mother’s fortune and left her destitute. She complained about Burt Sklar for years, while Burt refuted her accusations with calm condescension. He claimed Maud’s mother made bad decisions that he couldn’t talk her out of. Maud knew better but couldn’t prove it. The millions left by her stepfather simply vanished under Sklar’s skillful manipulation, leaving the family penniless. It was then that Maud discovered she had a knack for poker, and she made a steady income from outbluffing players who underestimated her.

Maud decides she will never bring Sklar to justice through legal means. She dresses in a Saint Laurent suit with designer heels, walks into The Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, and fires the pistol she carried in her tote at the man and his lunch companion. She drops the gun and calmly leaves. No one thinks to stop her and once on the street she takes the train to Baltimore, where she goes into hiding with a poker buddy. Because no one notices older women, she moved around as if she were invisible. The police could not find a trace of her.

From there the story offers one surprise after another. Bigamy, fraud, and murder all surface against the backdrop of frenetic New York society and gossip. This book initially reminded me of the Miss Melville series by Evelyn E. Smith from the 1980s, but this narrative is far more complex than those entertaining tales and just as rewarding.

There’s more than a whiff of autobiography in this book. Hitchcock not only plays poker as does her protagonist, but she also successfully brought legal action against an accountant who defrauded her mother of her inheritance. She starred in an episode of American Greed which shows how she alerted authorities to the larceny of the celebrity accountant Kenneth Ira Starr. Starr was subsequently convicted and served time in a federal prison in New York.

Winner of the 2019 Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing.

·         Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press (April 2, 2019)

·         Language: English

·         Hardcover: 264 pages

·         ISBN-10: 1464210675

·         ISBN-13: 978-1464210679 

 

Aubrey Hamilton ©2021

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.