![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
As a side benefit of pet-sitting for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
porcinea, I found and read two Amanda Cross books I hadn't realized existed. (The other is a short story collection.) Honest Doubt is her first novel with a detective other than Kate Fansler (though Kate is a character in this one), and her first novel told in first-person rather than tight third.
It also has footnotes. Not weird or silly footnotes a la Nabokov (I'm told) or Pratchett: actual academic-style footnotes, to books and stories the characters refer to. I had a lot of fun reading it: it flows well, and the viewpoint character is good company. Then I got to the end, wandered off, and started scribbling notes.
The viewpoint character is a professional detective (private eye, not police officer) called Woody Woodhaven (she comments on using that nickname because she doesn't care for her first and middle names). Woody is investigating what is either an accidental death or murder at a small college in rural New Jersey: the dead man died of an overdose of his heart medication. She winds up working with, and liking, both our old friend Kate Fansler and a New Jersey police officer named Don, who works for the sort of small-town police department that doesn't deal with murders very often.
Woody is fat and very up-front about it, feeling that it saves time to get the issue out there and make it plain that she doesn't consider it either taboo or a problem. This leads to an odd moment in which Kate Fansler, who she is consulting about what academic departments are like on the inside, says that she's willing to discuss Woody's size/body, if Woody likes, but her own is off limits: Kate, who we have been told in many novels is naturally "willowy", finds herself "sagging" and isn't happy about it. I like Woody, and I like the realism of the thin woman being more concerned about her weight than the fat one.
Amanda Cross usually has one writer as the theme of each of her mysteries, quoted and sometimes discussed. This time it's Tennyson: the dead man was a Tennyson expert and enthusiast, possibly to the point of mania. Most of the chapter epigraphs are from Tennyson, but not all. [Thanks tordkeir for reminding me of the word I needed.]
A lot of what's going on here is familiar Cross, perhaps too familiar, though well done. Woody tries to resign the case at least once--and, as in one of the early Kate Fansler novels, is talked out of it by someone, in this case Kate, who suggests that she was hired in order to fail: that the college wanted to be able to say they had investigated, but didn't want an answer. As in the earlier case, this turns out to be true.
The method in which the victim was killed is reminiscent of Cross's early Poetic Justice, as is the final decision to let the case drop.
The actual denoument, however, is an homage to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express: all this man's colleagues agreed to kill him, all tasted the retsina before poisoning it, and one of the key events in the book is one of them assaulting another, apparently unprovoked--but, our detectives figure, because the assault victim was thinking of confessing and implicating everyone.
I had fun, but I don't expect to buy or reread this one.
porcinea, I found and read two Amanda Cross books I hadn't realized existed. (The other is a short story collection.) Honest Doubt is her first novel with a detective other than Kate Fansler (though Kate is a character in this one), and her first novel told in first-person rather than tight third.It also has footnotes. Not weird or silly footnotes a la Nabokov (I'm told) or Pratchett: actual academic-style footnotes, to books and stories the characters refer to. I had a lot of fun reading it: it flows well, and the viewpoint character is good company. Then I got to the end, wandered off, and started scribbling notes.
The viewpoint character is a professional detective (private eye, not police officer) called Woody Woodhaven (she comments on using that nickname because she doesn't care for her first and middle names). Woody is investigating what is either an accidental death or murder at a small college in rural New Jersey: the dead man died of an overdose of his heart medication. She winds up working with, and liking, both our old friend Kate Fansler and a New Jersey police officer named Don, who works for the sort of small-town police department that doesn't deal with murders very often.
Woody is fat and very up-front about it, feeling that it saves time to get the issue out there and make it plain that she doesn't consider it either taboo or a problem. This leads to an odd moment in which Kate Fansler, who she is consulting about what academic departments are like on the inside, says that she's willing to discuss Woody's size/body, if Woody likes, but her own is off limits: Kate, who we have been told in many novels is naturally "willowy", finds herself "sagging" and isn't happy about it. I like Woody, and I like the realism of the thin woman being more concerned about her weight than the fat one.
Amanda Cross usually has one writer as the theme of each of her mysteries, quoted and sometimes discussed. This time it's Tennyson: the dead man was a Tennyson expert and enthusiast, possibly to the point of mania. Most of the chapter epigraphs are from Tennyson, but not all. [Thanks to
rdkeir for reminding me of the word I needed.]A lot of what's going on here is familiar Cross, perhaps too familiar, though well done. Woody tries to resign the case at least once--and, as in one of the early Kate Fansler novels, is talked out of it by someone, in this case Kate, who suggests that she was hired in order to fail: that the college wanted to be able to say they had investigated, but didn't want an answer. As in the earlier case, this turns out to be true.
The method in which the victim was killed is reminiscent of Cross's early Poetic Justice, as is the final decision to let the case drop.
The actual denoument, however, is an homage to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express: all this man's colleagues agreed to kill him, all tasted the retsina before poisoning it, and one of the key events in the book is one of them assaulting another, apparently unprovoked--but, our detectives figure, because the assault victim was thinking of confessing and implicating everyone.
I had fun, but I don't expect to buy or reread this one.
Tags: