Autumn Leaves, 1922: A Kiki Button Mystery

A Kiki Button Mystery #2

by Tessa Lunney

After a year away from Paris, Kiki Button is delighted to be back in City of Lights. But danger threatens her return as she is pulled into another spy mission—one that brings her ever closer to the rising fascist threat in Europe.

October 1922. Kiki Button has had a rough year at home in Australia after her mother’s sudden death. As the leaves turn gold on the Parisian boulevards, Kiki returns to Europe, more desperately in need of Paris and all its liveliness than ever. As soon as she arrives back in Montparnasse, Kiki takes up her life again, drinking with artists at the Café Rotonde, gossiping with her friends, and finding lovers among the enormous expatriate community. Even her summertime lover from the year before, handsome Russian exile Prince Theo Romanov, is waiting for her.

But it’s not all champagne and moonlit trysts. Theo is worried that his brother-in-law is being led astray by political fanatics. Kiki’s boy from home, Tom, is still hiding under a false name. Her friends are in trouble—Maisie has been blackmailed and looks for revenge, Bertie is still lovesick and lonely, and Harry has important information about her mother. And to top it off, she is found by Dr. Fox, her former spymaster, who insists that she work for him once more.

Amidst the gaiety of 1920s Paris, Kiki stalks the haunted, the hunted, and people still heartsore from the war. She parties with princes and Communist comrades, she wears ballgowns with Chanel and the Marchesa Casati, she talks politics with Hemingway and poetry with Sylvia Beach, and sips tea with Gertrude Stein. She confronts the men who would bring Europe into another war. And as she uses her gossip columnist connections for her mission, she also meets people who knew her mother, and can help to answer her burning why did her mother leave England all those years ago?

Genres: Mystery, Historical Fiction, Fiction

352 pages, Hardcover

Published August 3, 2021

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Morgan]

This is one of those books that if you didn't read #1 it makes no sense. After 5 chapters I put it away.

[Gwendalyn Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autumn Leaves, 1922: A Kiki Button Mystery

Thanks to @pegasus_books and @tessawynn @misskikibutton

This is the second installment in the Kiki Button Mystery, by the very talented author Tessa Lunney.

After reading the April In Paris, which delivered the perfect mystery and lust for extravagance and partying. Autumn Leaves, gives the reader another Immersible vibrant imagery of the times and era named Les Années Folles.

Kiki’s mother’s death sudden death brought about unanswered questions, returning to Europe after a years absence in Australia, She welcomes the open arms of Paris like a long lost lover.

Kiki Button decadent Parisian lifestyle comes to life under the authors seamless narration. As seeds of fascism are starting to take root in Paris and the rest of the world. In aftermath of the grueling first WW, Paris is jubilation to experience with return of the Arts, and the Cinema. The gaiety and abundant commerce attracts the artistic set from around the World. This hedonistic community swells, and Kiki finds herself into another spy mission. All the while Kiki’s friends have troubles abound, as she searches for insightful clues from people who knew her mother. Who might lead her to reason her mother left England.

Be warned Kiki Button, is no proper tea drinking Miss. She is a vivacious alluring protagonist that I can’t stop thinking about.
The authors immersible vibrant imagery along the well developed characters that literally jump off the page. I was captivated right from the start, and found myself taken up with the people and scenery of this gorgeous highly addictive book.

What I loved ::
-Paris
-Political Plots
-Missing diary
-Blackmail
-Espionage
-Glamour
-Coco Chanel
-Ernest Hemingway
-Gertrude Stein

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

As at least one other Goodreads reviewer noted, if you hadn't read the first book in this nascent series, April in Paris, 1921, you'd really be at a loss to make sense of the story or the characters.

As I read "Autumn Leaves, 1922" I also realized that author Lunney is a Jacqueline Winspear wannabe, and her heroine, Kiki Button is a louche wannabe for Winspear's Maisie Dobbs. Winspear does it a heckova lot better.

Lunny begins 1922 with a big dollop of literary and artistic side characters that promise to echo her reliance on that bohemian and creative crowd in "1921." That tease, however, falls by the wayside quite quickly, as the story pursues two plotlines: intervention in the infatuation of certain members of the British monarchy with German brownshirts and Mussolini's blackshirts, and tracking down Kiki's late mother's Parisian art world lover. Both themes have Kiki's "handler," Dr. Fox, either running the show or confoundingly being involved and manipulating developments.

Kiki smokes so incessantly that a lung cancer or emphysema story line in some subsequent book seems inevitable. That and a cirrhotic liver from her considerable alcohol intake and inability to eat more than an occasional mouthful of food before being seized by some emotional storm. And an STD from her catting around, too. "Louche" is used once in the book, but it really is the operative adjective for Kiki's madcap existence, even when being a spy/intelligence operative for Fox.

Maisie Dobbs has a loving father and friends; she had Dr. Maurice Blanche as her philosophic and life-path lodestone, and her moral compass shines through the many books in the Maisie Dobbs series, along with some really fine recounting of history and first four decades of the 20th Century atmosphere and period details. Kiki Button has several interesting friends but no supporting family, and her nemesis Fox is an evil force. How she supports herself in order to be able to wear the arresting outfits she sports at soirees and parties really isn't explained. Author Lunney does a good job of sketching early 1920s Paris, with cobblestones, cafes, train stations, but I still want more.

Winspear does it a lot better.

[Rita Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unusual book, mixing Kiki's life in Paris in the early 1920's with her quest to learn more about her mother by finding her last diary, whilst indulging in several affairs. Kiki is also working as a spy and is being manipulated by her former boss when she was a nurse during WW1 who holds vital evidence to clear the name of the man she loves. Complicated and intriguing.

[Moriah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does a great job capturing the post WWI energy in Paris amongst the bohemian crowd. I love the characters but Kiki and friends aren't for everyone. Really hope to see additional titles.

[jean kennedy-hubler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story.

Kiki Button is a full character on quite an adventure. It was a kick to go along. Enjoy the read.

[Ellen Brenner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled w this one. I like the trying to find the back story of her mom, but honestly the rest of the story I struggled to follow.

[Michelle Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just don't care anymore. I'm bored with the whole dissection of poetry. I like the character, Kiki, though.

[Candice Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I miss this book already. Will be looking for the others. I tried to make it last, but wanted to finish it before Christmas. Would read it again. Need a nice pastry & cup of coffee first.

[Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

I went into Tessa Lunney’s, Autumn Leaves, 1922, not realizing it was the second book in the Kiki Button Mystery series. Usually, with mysteries, this isn’t a hindrance to my enjoyment of a book. However, in this case, I probably was better off reading the first book...

Full review at: https://wp.me/p36jwx-25s

[Micah Horton hallett · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is so absolutely refreshing to find fiction set in 1920s Paris that does not succumb to the temptation of viewing the period through a Vaseline-smeared lens of 1950s morality.

The beautiful, haunted and broken (but unbowed) bohemian war veteran cum spy Kiki Button makes a giant evolutionary leap in this book from her first novel (Spring in Paris, 1921). The quality of the prose marks Tessa Lunney's growing assurance as an author, providing lines with real poetry as well as a remarkable attention to detail. Ms Lunney presents a Paris that is still haunted by the specter of war and characters that wear their emotional wounds on their sleeves in a city where every street recalls a slew of absent loved ones, but the cafes and bars fill to bursting with a generation prepared to dance the pain away.

Through it all Kiki strides unrepentantly sexual and enthusiastically self sufficient, but unashamedly reliant on the support of her friends and lovers. She is a proletarian Mata Hari, using her wit, charm and words to negotiate a landscape strewn with masculine violence, dancing her way through the heart of bohemia.

I loved this book. I hope Ms Button is around for many more to come. Strong recommend.