|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
It's North Dakota, 1964. Rotary dial telephones are on party lines, convertibles with big fins cruise Main Street, cigarettes are 27 cents a pack, the threat of nuclear warfare is always just below the surface of people's thoughts, and a killer is slashing throats in a small farming community where most people know each other, but no one knows anyone as well as they think they do.
The narrator of this novel by Larry D. Sweazy is Marjorie Trumaine, a farmer's wife who brings in extra money by indexing books and who is a friend and neighbor of the first victims. Since Marjorie is "the smartest person" Sheriff Hilo Jenkins knows, he asks her to help research the meaning of an amulet found at the scene of the crime. By doing so, Marjorie finds herself getting drawn into a dark world of Norse mythology. Things get worse when Marjorie discovers the third victim murdered just steps away from her own house where her blind, paralyzed husband lies helpless.
For this review, I read the uncorrected proofs, so I'm hoping that some of the repetition and misused words will be cleaned up before the book actually goes to press. But even with those distractions, SEE ALSO MURDER is an intriguing read. Sweazy is careful to keep the reader firmly situated in 1964 with a variety of details that capture the era. He also does a nice job with the physical settings of both the wind-buffeted, isolated farms and the small town situated under a wide sky. The characters, too, are realistically and believably drawn. Marjorie leads a fairly solitary life, so we spend a great deal of time in her head, but there's just enough interaction with others to keep that from becoming tedious. Plus, Marjorie is an interesting, thoughtful woman, so she's not boring to be with, and seeing the events entirely from her perspective ensures that some of those events are particularly unnerving.The main draw of the tale, though, is the tale itself. The unexpected elements of Norse mythology, the process of indexing, and the vision of life in North Dakota in 1964 all lend depth to the mystery, and there are enough red herrings and misdirections to make the solution to the puzzle satisfyingly – though not entirely – unexpected.
SEE ALSO MURDER is subtitled A Marjorie Trumaine Mystery—possibly to differentiate it from Sweazy's other series (he's an award-winning Western novelist), but may, we hope, indicate that this is the first in a new series starring this out-of-the-ordinary narrator in an unexpectedly interesting time and place.
§ Meredith Frazier, a writer with a background in English literature, lives in Dallas, Texas
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier, February 2015
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
