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I'm one of those readers who likes to read fiction with a "social agenda". There are ongoing debates about the purposes of fiction - whether it is to uplift, to entertain, to distract, to teach. I don't mind being taught as long as the writer incorporates the lesson into the story. Jeri Howard, the private eye created by Janet Dawson, is one of the under-appreciated characters in mystery fiction. She's smart, she has a life, she takes on interesting cases, some of which have political undertones and consequences. In Witness To Evil, Jeri starts out hesitatingly taking a case involving a missing teenager, Darcy Stefano. She ends up discovering more than she expected about some of society's evils, both past and present. This was not an easy book for me to read, and I read it twice; once when it first came out and last week in order to write this review. A major focus in Witness To Evil is anti-Semitism. Despite the fact that I read lots of mysteries, and prefer the hard-boiled, private eye genre, I'm somewhat of a wimp. One of the things I'm wimpy about is reading about the Holocaust. I can seldom do that. I have yet to be able to sit through the entire film of Schindler's List, although I did read the book from which it was created. I have had to leave the room when documentaries or movies about the Holocaust are on television. But I got through this book without stopping. Because Dawson tells a very good story, has created good people as well as bad, and you need to read to the end so you know what happens to them. The runaway in this story is an interesting young lady; her parents' way of dealing with problems is to pay someone to fix them and so they pay Jeri to find her. Interestingly, she's gone off to Paris. This isn't what I'd expect from a teenage runaway, but in this case, while I found that slightly unbelievable, if you're talking rebellion against two materialistic, shallow, uncaring people, why not Paris? Jeri finds Darcy quickly and easily and discovers she is searching out sites connected with the history of the Jews in and around Paris during World War II. Jeri learns that Darcy's grandmother, Adele Gregory, was "a hidden child", one of the Jewish children taken in by strangers during the Holocaust years. While this is of no interest to her parents, it is to Darcy. Things are resolved and Darcy returns home. Months later, on a hot July day however, Jeri returns home on Sunday to find a message on her answering machine from Darcy Stefano asking for Jeri's help. When she calls the Stefanos to try and understand what's happening, she's told that Darcy was sent to a boarding school in Bakersfield, in Southern California and that the police are looking for her. Someone at the school was murdered, and Darcy was missing. Darcy was forced to attend the school, essentially abducted by a firm called Valley Security, and brought to the school; Jeri learns this after Darcy's mother Elaine has lied and said she drove Darcy down to the school. In fact, Elaine went to the mall. For the girl's sake, and at the request of Adele Gregory, she travels south to try and unravel the mess. The school is apparently for "problem adolescents". A Jeri digs, she discovers that the background of the school's administrators is questionable at best, that the murdered man was in fact a reporter, who had hired on at the school to investigate it. The students are carefully watched and monitored by staff; there are, to put it mildly, strange and creepy people around. The second half of this seemingly unrelated story becomes frighteningly real when Jeri realizes that the Perris School is run by a couple of bigots. It's not just bigotry, but obvious hatred and support of skinhead activities that triggered Darcy's disappearance. With her clear understanding of anti-Semitism and her grandmother's past, Darcy's more aware than most kids of Klan and white supremacy activities. These people are ugly, mean and evil. In the end, Jeri discovers enough to bring them down, and their true selves are revealed. The paperback of Witness To Evil contains an interview with the author about her research into the Hidden Children and Paris. It's worth reading; don't quit after the last page of the novel.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, March 2000
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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