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.
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