Review | Another great Gatsby, Jay’s sister Greta, has a murder to solve in The Gatsby Gambit
F. Scott Fitzgerald classic is riffed on by Claire Anderson-Wheeler, with Jay Gatsby’s sister Greta looking into the death of Tom Buchanan
If you polled 100 people about who is the most awful among the awful people in The Great Gatsby, I bet 99 of them would answer “that louse Tom Buchanan”. In the new book The Gatsby Gambit, Buchanan finally gets what’s coming to him.
Daisy Buchanan’s loathsome husband is murdered early on in Claire Anderson-Wheeler’s mystery novel that is timed to capitalise on the centenary of The Great Gatsby, which fell on April 10, 2025.
North Dakotan-turned-dreamy-poor-little-rich-boy Jay Gatsby is around in The Gatsby Gambit, but the new book’s protagonist is his hitherto unknown sister, Greta. Her name, you’ll note, is an anagram of “Great” and, between her wit and her insightful suspicion of her brother’s dissolute pals, the character is indeed another great Gatsby.
With F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless characters now in the public domain, we are getting lots of fresh takes on them, including several graphic novel versions, a book called Nick that puts The Great Gatsby’s narrator Nick Carraway at its centre, and a comic book that pits Jay Gatsby against Godzilla in Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre.
Anderson-Wheeler isn’t the stylist that Fitzgerald was – not many are – but she understands his characters. That understanding informs The Gatsby Gambit, which smartly recognises that star-crossed lovers Jay and Daisy were never meant to be, even with Tom conveniently out of the picture.
Anderson-Wheeler also knows that happiness may never be on the cards for any of these characters, despite their wealth and beauty.