These new crime novels feature puzzles, plot twists and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sash Bischoff’s clever “Sweet Fury” is rife with references and allusions to the “Great Gatsby” author.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece “The Great Gatsby.” In advance of this, debut novelist Sash Bischoff presents a story about an actor and her film-director fiancé embarking on a feminist retelling of Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.” The actor, Lila Crayne, simultaneously embarks on a course of therapy with the biblically named psychoanalyst Jonah Gabriel, an interaction that will resurface buried trauma and fraught relationships from her past.

This crafty novel uses the author’s experience as a theatre director to good effect in behind-the-scenes on-set sequences, while the relationship between Lila and Jonah cagily recalls the central characters in “Tender Is the Night,” themselves a therapist and his troubled patient-turned-wife (the latter based closely on Fitzgerald’s own wife, Zelda). Trying to stay one step ahead of who is playing whom accounts for most of the book’s pleasures, which are only marred by a few too many self-conscious Fitzgerald references and allusions.

Read the full review here: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/these-new-crime-novels-feature-puzzles-plot-twists-and-f-scott-fitzgerald/article_911b7980-cf89-11ef-b1e7-7fb38dd50f1e.html