THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9607010174
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DOUGLAS G. GREENE
LENGTH: 118 lines
During the late spring and early summer, three premier suspense novelists, all women, produced their annual blockbusters.
Mary Higgins Clark's Moonlight Becomes You (Simon & Schuster, 331 pp., $24) is one of her finest books. Clark opens with a terrifying, Poe-esque prologue in which the protagonist wakes to find herself buried alive, then tells a compelling story about discovery and loss, age and youth, family and love.
Maggie Holloway unexpectedly meets her estranged stepmother, Nuala Moore, but just as they begin to re-create their relationship, Nuala is brutally murdered during an apparent burglary. Maggie becomes convinced that the killing has a deeper motive, connected with an elegant Newport, R.I., retirement home. Clark has made a career of stories about children in peril. But Moonlight Becomes You is about aging and death - one subsidiary theme being the history of funeral customs. And, surprisingly for Clark, the novel features strong detection and dextrous clue-juggling.
With Hotel Paradise (Alfred A. Knopf, 348 pp., $24), Martha Grimes, long known for her Inspector Jury novels set in England, charts a new direction - though not entirely successfully. The protagonist, a 12-year-old girl, lives with her small family in a no-longer fashionable Appalachian hotel. She becomes obsessed with discovering why another 12-year-old girl drowned 40 years ago. Gradually, she encourages a fascinating group of rural types to reminisce about the long-ago death, and eventually past meets present when there is another mysterious death.
The key words, however, in describing Hotel Paradise are ``gradually'' and ``eventually.'' The pace is maddeningly slow, and the narrative is filled with lengthy diversions that lead nowhere. Grimes seems uncertain whether she is creating a plot-driven mystery novel or a leisurely mood piece, and the result is frustrating. But some of the individual scenes, especially those set around Spirit Lake, stick in the memory.
Marcia Muller does not have any problems with pace and narrative structure. The Broken Promise Land (Mysterious Press, 389 pp., $22.95), her 18th book about private investigator Sharon McCone, moves along like the speeding train depicted on the dust jacket.
McCone's brother-in-law, country singer Ricky Savage, is threatened by anonymous letters, and to protect him McCone investigates the pop-music industry. What she finds is not attractive - drugs, casual sex, and people using people before throwing them away. Ricky, whom McCone likes for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, has a history of brief relationships with music-groupies, one of whom has pledged to get even if he doesn't make her a star. Has she emerged to stalk Ricky, or is one of his music associates responsible for the threats?
Meanwhile, Ricky's marriage is breaking up, and he is beginning a relationship with McCone's assistant Rae Kelleher. (I pity Rae.) Even when the characters aren't likeable, however, Muller masterfully builds tension and creates motives through human relationships. Few readers will be able to leave The Broken Promise Land before its shocking conclusion.
Sandra West Prowell is one of the newer writers following the female private eye path blazed by Muller. Her third book, When Wallflowers Die (Walker, 336 pp., $22.95), does not (as her publisher claims) put her ``in the very top echelon of mystery writers,'' but it shows that she is very good indeed.
Billings, Mont., private investigator Phoebe Siegel is hired by a gubernatorial hopeful to find out why his wife was beaten to death almost 30 years ago. The candidate had been a suspect, but there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. Now he wants Siegel to locate a witness who disappeared shortly after the killing. Soon, she's investigating corruption in Montana politics and society, much of which seems to revolve around ``Dragon Lady'' Rosella Dahl, the mother of the slain woman.
Meanwhile, as seems obligatory in mysteries of the 1990s, the sleuth must confront changes in her own life - her increasing love for Kyle Old Wolf, a Native American policeman in Billings, and the fall from grace of her brother, who is (but not for long?) a priest. When Wallflowers Die is a beautifully written and structured novel - and the solution to the mystery is totally satisfying.
Although Marele Day won the Private Eye Writers' ``Shamus'' Award three years ago with a book imported from Australia, The Disappearance of Madalena Grimaldi (Walker, 219 pp., $19.95) is her first Claudia Valentine mystery to be published in the United States. I have sometimes wondered why so many private-eye novels begin with the search for a missing daughter - perhaps because the terror of the loss of a child is a parent's worst nightmare. In a sense, Claudia Valentine herself is a lost child.
While searching for Madalena, Valentine also tries to find out about the life and death of her father, who deserted the family many years ago and apparently died as an alcoholic derelict. The novel is better as an evocation of Australian urban life and the story of the detective's self-discovery than it is as an exercise in sleuthing - Valentine should have followed up some clues a little more quickly - but it demonstrates that Sydney has as many mean streets as any American city.
One of the finest books of the season, The Anatomy of Murder (Signet, 257 pp., $5.50), Bill Pomidor's second Cal and Plato Marley mystery, has sneaked into the bookstores as a paperback original. Dr. Calista Marley, a forensic pathologist in Cleveland, and her husband, Plato, a family physician, make the best husband-and-wife sleuths since Nick and Nora Charles - their wisecracking warmth and mutual respect make up somewhat for too many autopsy scenes. (Ever since Patricia Cornwell started the tendency, mystery authors have had to become experts on taking corpses apart.)
As Cal and Plato are lecturing to medical students, they realize that the cadaver they are using as an example is the remains of a friend who willed her body to science. To make matters more shocking, Cal quickly finds that she was smothered to death. During their murder investigation, Cal and Plato are drawn into the sometimes sleazy worlds of pharmaceutical development and medical school politics. The Anatomy of Murder is a ``don't-miss'' book.
While Pomidor follows Cornwell into the dissecting room, Jean Hager quietly works in Tony Hillerman's territory, writing novels with Native American protagonists. Fire Carrier (Mysterious Press, 241 pp., $21.95), the fifth novel featuring Police Chief Mitch Bushyhead, is a marvelous combination of traditional lore and contemporary social problems.
In the background of the story is the Cherokee legend of a ``fire carrier'' and Bushyhead's discovery of his own heritage; in the foreground is the problem of spousal abuse. Tyler Hatch, director of a Jobs Corp Center, has been beating his wife, and when he is found slain the wife becomes the immediate suspect. As the single father of a rambunctious teenaged daughter, Bushyhead is concerned about family relationships. Part Cherokee herself, Jean Hager talks about the demands of different cultures with strength and sensitivity - and without recourse to autopsy scenes. MEMO: Douglas G. Greene, director of the Institute of Humanities at Old
Dominion University, is currently editing the anthology, ``Detection by
Gaslight: The Best Victorian and Edwardian Mystery Stories.'' by CNB