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Getting there | page 1, 2
The climax itself seems interminable, however, and once the explanation begins, the mind boggles. Oh, the identity of the murderer -- which for obvious reasons Elise hears about rather than divines -- is reasonable enough. The reader will probably guess it, but remember, you're not supposed to pick this book for its solution. Still, you have to go through dozens of pages of gobbledygook in the closing chapters: bogus psychiatric analyses, who thought what when, what was a coincidence and what wasn't, etc., etc. This astonishingly jury-rigged nonsense is the result of Aubert's having sacrificed everything to keep you turning the pages. The ride, I must say, is fabulous, but you may find you have to pay too high a price for it. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Moment of Truth, by Lisa Scottoline, has the opposite problem, which is the more common one. Because mysteries by definition require a question and an answer, many writers think that by simply supplying a plausible answer they've got the whole problem licked. The problem for the reader is: Will the sometimes tedious journey through fairly indifferent prose pay off in the end? Here the committed reader of mysteries is the most hopeful specimen of humankind. Time and time again you are disappointed, but memories of the one purely satisfying solution you read -- when? your sophomore year in college? -- keep you reaching for more. I look for certain tip-offs. "Surprising" in a blurb on the back cover is good; "twisty" or "Hitchcockian" is better. (For some reason People magazine is especially reliable in this regard. Its writers have a good eye for a fake-out.) I also have learned to trust certain authors; that's one reason series are so important to the genre. You can check out the prose to make sure it's readable, but there is no way you can check out a possible surprise ending without ruining it. So you get to know who's going to come through. Lisa Scottoline generally does, which is what kept me going through most of her new novel. The lack of suspense here was uncharacteristically extreme, even wondrous. A man comes home and finds his loathsome wife murdered. He suspects his already victimized daughter and so decides to confess to the crime himself. About 200 pages pass as his lawyer and the justice system catch up to what we knew from the beginning. Then, at the end, firecrackers: The reader is treated to a truly nice double-twist. It is hard to imagine, in fact, how such an interesting murderer could be attached to such a dull narrative. But Scottoline may have gotten herself too far in debt to us for the payoff to be worth it. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Deep South, by Nevada Barr, is not quite so misshapen. Like Scottoline’s latest, this book is much better at the end than through the body, although the disparity in this case is not as great. Barr tries to increase the journey's interest by describing the workplace tensions and accommodations of the heroine and her investigative team -- making it a sort of police procedural of the emotions. Park Ranger Anna Pigeon, a transplanted Westerner new to Mississippi, has to deal with obstreperous underlings who don't want to be bossed by a woman, with her growing feelings for the local sheriff and with one dead and disfigured teenage girl. Barr has the confidence to let Pigeon be unlikable (she says she doesn't like children, for instance, while contemplating the corpse), and as a result we like this character all the more. But the situations and the other characters are pretty much pro forma, so I was pleasantly surprised by the solution, which is clever and perfectly fair. A lot of what looks like local color -- and feels a little too researched -- is actually key information that takes on importance in the final chapters. Because of the relatively sensible
proportion of story to ending, "Deep
South" is probably the most competent of
the three works I've considered here --
if competence is what you're looking for
in a mystery. I'm not sure I am. Jacqueline Carey's column on mystries runs every month, alternating on Fridays with Ann Hodgman on cookbooks, Melanie Rehak on poetry and Polly Shulman on science fiction and fantasy.
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