2007 mystery or at least mystery-adjacent; first in the Spellmans
series. Izzy Spellman is a private investigator, from a family of the
same. This does not make things simpler when her younger sister goes
missing.
Well, there is some investigation here, but this is much more
about character than about mystery. Indeed, something like nine-tenths
of the book is flashbacks covering Izzy's life up to the point where
she's being interviewed about her sister's disappearance.
She's an interesting character, that rarity in real life of someone
who's badly messed up in a variety of ways but still interesting
rather than monomanic. Dysfunctional family comedy (they all spy on
each other and on everyone else any of them meet; Izzy's mother tails
her for days in an attempt to find out who her boyfriend is) is less
to my taste, but Spellman's first-person voice carried me over this
too.
Friday night, an hour before my date with the fraud defense
attorney, David called me up and told me to be on my best behavior
or there would be repercussions. As I raced out of my apartment to
meet Hunter on the street (in an attempt to avoid any parent-lawyer
introductions), my mother shouted out the window at me, "Just be
yourself, honey." Contradictions like this have made my family life
so difficult.
Izzy is a moderately unsympathetic character, most of the rest of the
cast are even more so, and yet I did enjoy this in spite of the
near-absence of plot; apart from the private eye framing, and a couple
of short investigations, this is really more a story about people than
about crime. I'd be very cautious about recommending it; even I in a
different mood might have hated it, never mind anyone else. (But the
series made the NYT Best Seller list repeatedly.)
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