Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of Death at Greenway by Lori Rader-Day

Death at Greenway by Lori Rader-Day

Death at Greenway

A Novel

by Lori Rader-Day

  • Published:
  • Oct 2021, 448 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

From the award-winning author of The Day I Died and The Lucky One, a captivating suspense novel about nurses during World War II who come to Agatha Christie's holiday estate to care for evacuated children, but when a body is discovered nearby, the idyllic setting becomes host to a deadly mystery.

Bridey Kelly has come to Greenway House—the beloved holiday home of Agatha Christie—in disgrace. A terrible mistake at St. Prisca's Hospital in London has led to her dismissal as a nurse trainee, and her only chance for redemption is a position in the countryside caring for children evacuated to safety from the Blitz.

Greenway is a beautiful home full of riddles: wondrous curios not to be touched, restrictions on rooms not to be entered, and a generous library, filled with books about murder. The biggest mystery might be the other nurse, Gigi, who is like no one Bridey has ever met. Chasing ten young children through the winding paths of the estate grounds might have soothed Bridey's anxieties and grief—if Greenway were not situated so near the English Channel and the rising aggressions of the war.

When a body washes ashore near the estate, Bridey is horrified to realize this is not a victim of war, but of a brutal killing. As the local villagers look among themselves, Bridey and Gigi discover they each harbor dangerous secrets about what has led them to Greenway. With a mystery writer's home as their unsettling backdrop, the young women must unravel the truth before their safe haven becomes a place of death ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Richly nuanced mystery ... Rader-Day nicely evokes the isolation and dislocations of people in WWII Britain while revealing her characters' complexities. Despite the many allusions to Christie's life and work, she eschews an artificially neat conclusion. Fans of both Christie and Rader-Day will relish this." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Chicago author Lori Rader-Day pays a fictional tribute to Christie in Death at Greenway, a suitably suspenseful novel in which World War II nurses tend to London-evacuated children at the absent mystery writer's holiday home; the owner's occupation takes on added significance when the corpse of a murder victim is found on a nearby beach." —Wall Street Journal

"Far from a cozy mystery, Death at Greenway is as taut as a bow string, with every character capable of snapping at a moment's notice." —BookPage

"Death at Greenway is a book Lori Rader-Day was born to write. The characters are deeply moving, the suspense and World War II research are impeccable. The language, as is always the case with Rader-Day, is beautiful, but in Greenway, she shows her suppleness: her pitch-perfect dialogue brings England in the Blitz to life." —Sara Paretsky, New York Times bestselling author of Dead Land

"Death at Greenway by Lori Rader-Day is an immersive, expansive WWII tale of murder and revenge. Set at Agatha Christie's real-life country home, disgraced nurse-in-training, Bridey Kelly, is tasked to help care for a group of children seeking safety from war-torn London. Still, danger is everywhere and with unseen evil lurking, Bridey has to navigate a mysterious web of lies. Well-crafted and multi-layered, Death at Greenway is a vivid portrait of a woman trying to outrun her past in hopes of finding her place in a broken world." —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of This is How I Lied

This information about Death at Greenway was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Lori Rader-Day

Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award–nominated and Anthony, Agatha, and Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author of Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She lives in Chicago, where she is cochair of the mystery readers' conference Midwest Mystery Conference and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. She served as the national president of Sisters in Crime in 2020.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more thrillers...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: My Friends
    My Friends
    by Hisham Matar
    The title of Hisham Matar's My Friends takes on affectionate but mournful tones as its story unfolds...
  • Book Jacket: James
    James
    by Percival Everett
    The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023) and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, ...
  • Book Jacket
    But the Girl
    by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
    Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's But the Girl begins with the real-life disappearance of Malaysia Airlines ...
  • Book Jacket: Patriot
    Patriot
    by Alexei Navalny
    On the 17th of January, 2024, colleagues of Alexei Navalny posted a message to his Instagram account...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: The power to see, to sense, and to say. ...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.