RogerBW's Blog

1968 mystery. Corin Johansen moves to Boston to be a designer, and finds her rented room is cheaper if she agrees to use the kitchen… There's a ghost, you see.

Or maybe not. This is after all fairly early in MacLeod's writing career when she was still trying to be moderately serious, so although the boarding house's owner turns out to be a former circus leopard- and lion-tamer (now reduced to mere ocelots), the mystery is a real one, with stolen jewellery and an assault with "one o' them new pocket gas guns".

The other half of the story is a sort of negative bildungsroman, as Corin comes to realise that she's not all that great shakes as a designer (though almost everyone else is impressed with her work) and what she really wants to do with her life is keep house as the wife (and model) of a genius painter. I suppose there are people who feel that way (and waste a term at design school finding out, taking a place away from someone who might actually have benefited from it) but these are not in general characters I want to read about.

Combine that with a fairly straightforward mystery, and there isn't all that much to this book; and it's pretty short, only a novella by modern standards though it was published independently. A passing amusement with a sour and dated undertaste.