Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Dead Letters by Jane Haddam

Dead Letters by Orania Papazoglou writing as Jane Haddam is her first mystery featuring Georgia Xenakis, a New York City investigative journalist who returned to her hometown of Canfield in Connecticut to care for her ailing mother. Georgia found work teaching English in a for-profit college and managed to write a freelance article here and there to maintain her foothold in the New York journalism scene.

The failure of a local investment fund several years earlier still has everyone talking, not least because Jeff Laramie, who ran the investment fund, was killed shortly afterwards. His wife Margaret stood trial for his murder but was acquitted. She is living as a recluse across the street from Georgia while everyone in town believes she should be in jail. In the meantime no one is trying to find the real murderer.

The book opens just before Christmas, about a week after the funeral of Georgia’s mother. Georgia is still coming to terms with the huge change in her personal circumstances while the college administrators are demanding that she reverse the failing grade she gave the son of the town’s First Selectman. Since the grade was based on a paper taken verbatim from a Smithsonian journal, Georgia thinks the student should be expelled. The college administrators are more interested in revenue than ethics, however, and a painful meeting with the student, his father, and the college administration ensues.

After the meeting Georgia walks away from the university distracted and upset and ends up in a deserted subdivision of empty houses, their previous owners victims to the economic downturn. She finds an abandoned dog and searching for the dog’s owners, she stumbles onto the strangled body of her neighbor Margaret Laramie, whom Georgia just saw a few hours earlier across town.

The labyrinthine plot with multiple threads is exactly what I expect from the author of the Gregor Demarkian series. The diverse cast of characters is vividly delineated with their human frailty on full display. They include the new police chief, former head of Homicide in the Charlottesville, NC, police department, whom the First Selectman hired because he assumed a Southerner could be pushed around; the pair of childhood friends who grew up on the same street with Georgia and became the town gossips; and the free spirit owner of a coffee shop who runs a dog and cat rescue. The focus of Georgia’s suspicion bounces around like a pinball machine, and the perpetrator turns out to be someone I didn’t consider for a minute.

There are a number of enjoyable scenes. I particularly liked the bit where Georgia decides to respond to the neighborhood critics who have complained about her lack of holiday decor over the years by putting up the most tasteless display she can quickly assemble, a la Peter Shandy. Then the gossipy friends decide that the crime scene tape and police seals on a house do not apply to them and they break in to check things out, after which the police chief arrests them and they spend the night in jail. And on and on.

I look forward to seeing Georgia’s next adventure.

The occasional typo was jarring. I hope the Kindle version is corrected and a new one released.

·         File Size: 1933 KB

·         Print Length: 426 pages

·         Publication Date: January 9, 2018

·         Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC

·         Language: English

·         ASIN: B078XJWW1C

Aubrey Hamilton © 2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal IT projects by day and reads mysteries at night.