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Although Callie Anson and her clerical cavortings would seem, by the book jacket, to be the center of the book, they are not. Instead, her intended's, and his department's criminal investigation of a ten boy's stabbing death and possible acts of cyber-bullying creates a moral center about which Cally's actions are only peripheral. But to the point:
Dramatis personae: Detective Inspector Neville Stewart, Sergeant DS Sid Cowley, PC Dewi Jones, and Marco Lombardi, London policemen, who unravel the murder of Sebastian Frost. Callie Anson, a deacon in the Church of England, dumped by bone-headed Adam, courted by handsome Marco Lombardi, Italian Catholic; Callie's silly girlfriends: Tamsin, a bosomy blond who loves her device, and Val, her extremely married-and-proud-of-it girlfriend who flashes her rock at all who will look; Margaret Phillips, Principal of Archbishop Temple House, Cambridge, who is falling in love with Cambridge Tutor Keith Moody, and whose son is gay; Hanna Young, Margaret's nosey administrative assistant; the dead boy's school pals: Sexie Lexie, Olly Blount, who eventually rats out his pals, Hugo Somerville, the dead boy's best friend, Tom Gresham, who seems very disturbed; Lilith Noone, the inevitable annoying journalist; the dead boy's impossibly controlling mother and doormat dad.
Sections, not chapters, alternate between the goings-on at a deacon's retreat (almost none involving the spirit and almost all involving the marriage game) and those grimly pursued by the police as they suss out the boy's murderer. The chapters don't really seem to correspond to the book's organization. Perhaps they were a good place to leave off writing for the day.
Sebastian Frost, a handsome teen, has been stabbed to death, his tongue cut. As the police interview those who last saw the boy alive, they focus more and more on a tight circle of teen-aged friends and the things they are doing without their parents' awareness, and thus arises the first of the book's foci: communication via modern technology. Janie, a vicar's middle-aged wife, discovers she is pregnant, and so is her son's girlfriend. Perhaps her pregnancy can stem her worry about losing the magic of marriage. Family Liaison Officer Marco's mamma is desperate to find just the right girl for her handsome boy, Callie's brother is gay. Thus the second, third, and fourth foci: finding a mate, bringing the next generation into the world, and discovering one's child prefers the same sex. As readers turn the pages, the police work through their clues, and the gossipy deacons turn over their love-lives over a full English, we realize how much the book's ideas circle back and again to love and loss, hopes for children and griefs for their griefs.
These centers of discussion are entirely appropriate in a murder mystery. My chief complaint is that, although the volume's cover trumpets "A Callie Anson Mystery," Callie does not solve mysteries. The police do. She seems far too silly to solve anything quite so serious as murder. Morals, too, is a perfect thing to discuss in a murder mystery, yet, during the deacon's retreat which Callie is attending, we hear precious little about God, and a great deal about shopping. The cover billing also notes that the author is "The Queen of Clerical Crime." Since crimes of the spirit seem rarely to surface here and since devotion is barely touched upon, I wonder if that book jacket blurb, as well, is unearned.
Despite the facts that our devices can cause terrible trouble and considering their places in our lives is something we should do, and despite the fact that deacons must have fun, too, and I am sure they must, verisimilitude works two ways. It can either make a book comfortingly real, or it can make it pedestrian. I am afraid that Kate Charles may have achieved the latter here.
§ C. Downs, Ph.D., is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, May 2015
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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