2001 mystery, first in the Berger and Mitry series. Mitch Berger is a
New York film critic mourning his dead wife, who rents a house in a
rural (but rich) part of Connecticut; Desiree Mitry is a cop on the
Serious Crimes Squad. So when Berger digs up a body in the vegetable
patch…
So yeah, she's a cop, he's not a cop (and he has a dead wife for
motivation), they solve crimes and fall for each other. So far so
clichéd. But both the leads (who get alternating chapters) have a bit
more to them than the basics; she does charcoal sketches of crime
scene photos, and finds homes for stray cats, while he's a bit too
ready to see things in terms of filmic clichés (to the point of
endangering his life).
A gated island community provides an effective locked-room problem,
but everyone could have done it; working out who actually did is
rather tougher, especially when plausible candidates start to turn up
dead. Mitry is already fighting her department since she's non-male
and non-white, and they're quite happy to take the easy answer of a
remorseful suicide… but of course it's not as simple as that.
It's the other people who make this book, though, the suspects and
hangers-on: Berger's landlady, living next door; her ex-husband and
lawyer, and his new young wife; the handyman with a past… all right,
this is a book where people have trauma from Vietnam rather than
anything more recent, but they're mostly in their fifties in 2001 so
that does hold together. It's these people's interplay (and they're
all differently horrible, murderers or not) that retains the reader's
interest, more than the case itself and the shadows from the past that
may have provoked it.
"Does he stay out on you regularly?" Des pressed her.
The girl shrugged again, although this time her nostrils flared
slightly. Evidently, Tuck Weems was not a one-teenager man.
This is lighter than many modern mysteries: nasty things have happened
and will continue to happen, but there's never any doubt that justice
will prevail. If Berger comes over as a little too self-satisfied and
sure of his privilege, well, things don't go quite as well for him as
they might; the male-gazey descriptions of attractive Mitry (and
glossing over unattractive Berger) are more annoying. But I've read
Robert Parker, and this is nothing like as bad as that.
Followed by The Hot Pink Farmhouse.
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