April In Paris, 1921

By Tessa Lunney

Meet the glamorous, witty and charming Kiki Button: socialite, private detective and spy. We all have secrets - it's just that Kiki has more than most ... Sparkling, witty and engaging crime fiction - one for fans of Phryne Fisher and Julian Fellowes

It's 1921, and after two years at home in Australia, Katherine King Button has had enough. Her rich parents have ordered her to get married, but after serving as a nurse during the horrors of the Great War, she has vowed never to take orders again. She flees her parents and the prison of their expectations for the place of friendship and freedom: Paris.

Paris in 1921 is the city of freedom, the place where she can remake herself as Kiki Button, gossip columnist extraordinaire, partying with the rich and famous, the bohemian and bold, the suspicious and strange.

But on the modelling dais, Picasso gives her a job: to find his wife's portrait, which has gone mysteriously missing. That same night, her old spymaster from the war contacts her - she has to find a double agent or face jail. Through parties, whisky and informants, Kiki has to use every ounce of her determination, her wit and her wiles to save herself, the man she adores, and the life she has come to love - in just one week.

Playful, charming, witty and very, very entertaining, Kiki Button - the fearless, beautiful and blonde-bobbed Australienne - is a heroine to win hearts.

'Button is naughtier than Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher, as strong as Suzanne Arruda's Jade del Cameron, and every bit as clever as Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope. This thoroughly entertaining, delightfully witty debut is imbued with Paris' unique ambiance and will have readers eagerly awaiting Button's next adventure.' Booklist (starred)

'Lunney's vibrant picture of Paris, chock-full of flapper fashion and cameos of the Lost Generation, will leave readers eager for more.' Publishers Weekly

'Kikki Button lives by her wits, her style and an irrepressible joie de vivre' Sulari Gentill, author, A Few Right Thinking Men

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jun 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781460709894

Tessa Lunney

Tessa Lunney is a novelist, poet, and occasional academic. In 2016 she won the prestigious Griffith University Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature for 'Chess and Dragonflies' and the A Room Of Her Own Foundation Orlando Prize for Fiction for her story 'Those Ebola Burners Them'. She was also the recipient of a Varuna Fellowship. In 2013, she graduated from Western Sydney University with a Doctorate of Creative Arts that explored silence in Australian war fiction. In 2014 she was awarded an Australia Council ArtStart grant for literature. Her poetry, short fiction, and reviews have been published in Best Australian Poems 2014, Southerly, Cordite,Griffith Review, and the Australian Book Review, among others. https://tessalunney.com/

Reviews for April In Paris, 1921

[clarerhoden · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There are many, many things to like about this book. Paris! in the roaring twenties, with more Bright Young Things than you could poke a stick at. I loved the fashions, the streetscapes, the cafe scenes, the cocktails, and the wonderful way that Lunney creates the sense of a generation trying to put the horrors and privations of the Great War behind them. The myster(ies) within the story are interesting and intriguing.
The heroine, Kiki Button, is embarking on a career as a spy, detective, and gossip columnist, not necessarily in that order. An Australian who nursed on the Western Front during the war, Kiki is escaping the 'get-married-and-make-grandchildren-asap' pressure of her rich parents. This she does by pretending to embark on another London season while actually going to live in (almost) complete freedom in Paris. There is a great sense of liberation on all levels, though the ever-growing threat of fascism rears its ugly head, in keeping with the inter-war years setting.
There are some beautiful poetic and arresting images (Lunney is also a poet): 'The sky was purple like lilacs, like royalty, like a bruised mouth, as it passed slowly into darkness.'
*Spoilers below*
Now, to the list of things that may not sit well with some readers. There is an awful lot of regurgitated poetry in the guise of spy code. In such an adventure (think Christie's Tommy and Tuppence, or Greenwood's Phryne Fisher), the weight of this code feels a bit stodgy, interrupting the flow of the plot. It's almost as if it belongs in a different book.
Ditto the omnipresent sex scenes. Yes, we are in the age of liberation, but not every reader will enjoy the sweet, juicy, pan-sexual exploits of our heroine. (Mind you, if you love this stuff, Lunney does it very well!). All the cheerful, exhausting sex is carried out with gusto and not a whit of emotional connection, unless it's 'an old lover' like Bertie, to whom Kiki is very affectionate. In the spirit of female freedom, Kiki is rather predatory - at one stage, she 'valiantly assaults' the 'virtue' of a tasty young man 'for the rest of the night to great success'. This just made me feel a bit sick, thinking that it was rather like the old gumshoe detective books of the 50s and 60s, where a ditective was not successful unless he regularly seduced a succession of 'broads'. Hmm. Some of the characters appear to be no more than sex toys for Kiki, and that made me uncomfortable. On the other hand, checking thru the reviews shows me that the vast majority of readers will lap up the excitement and wit of these encounters with great pleasure.
There is also a fair bit of name-dropping, no doubt situating Kiki in the important circles of the time, but it didn't feel very Australian - it seemed a bit show-off that Kiki has a threesome with Picasso and his lover, that she hobnobs with Paul Nash, etc. But not with the love of her life, Tom-Tom...Interesting.
The further development of Kiki in subsequent books (I do trust there are more in the pipeline, as this one is sub-titled 'a Kiki Button mystery') will be most interesting to watch.
Try it. You will most like absolutely love it.