About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

DARK COULEE, A Claire Watkins Mystery
by Mary Logue
Walker & Co., October 2000
229 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0802733514


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Local author Mary Logue is back with her second mystery featuring deputy sheriff Claire Watkins. Mystery and crime take a back seat to the carefully drawn characterizations of several citizens in this novel, and their progression toward an uncertain future.

For those of us who live in the area, Logue is careful to shape her novel in places and with moods many of us know well. For those outside the geographic area, Dark Coulee brings the exotic as well as the down-home flavor of small town Wisconsin accurately to the reader. What makes the novel even more interesting is a constant and unsettling current of evil that one senses even where not overtly addressed. Students of the social fabric of small town America will attest that evil can, and does, occur everywhere.

Logue's protagonist is again Claire Watkins who has moved to the small community of Fort Antoine, Wisconsin, to recover her equilibrium after the murder of her detective husband and to rebuild her life in greater safety. But, she's still a good cop, and so she is soon employed by the local county sheriff. With her daughter, Meg, she is creating a new life for herself. But the resolution of the murder of her husband still intrudes, and Watkins, is forced to deal with her own alter-antagonist in her dreams.

This personal trouble, and the way it intrudes on her relationships forms a second strong theme in the book and it is interesting to see how it plays out while Watkins wrestles with the stabbing murder of a local farmer. Jed Spitzler is, on the surface, an unremarkable local farmer and widower, quiet, raising three kids and farming his land. Oh, there were lingering questions about the horrific death of Spitzler's wife in an unusual farm accident a few years ago, but such questions and attendant gossip in small towns are not unknown. What is known is that at a street dance in a nearby town, Jed Spitzler dies, stabbed in the gut with a sharp knife. His oldest children, Brad and Jenny, find him on the ground dying and the town's annual celebration is turned into pandemonium. And if this reviewer wished for a little more of the flavor of the street dance, well, the pace of this novel is measured and careful. Logue demonstrates her control all the way.

So, who killed Jed Spittzler and why? For Claire, the stabbing brings the city dangerously closer. The longer she examines the case and probes beneath the calm surface of the county, the more trouble and the more questions she uncovers. And while the resolution of the case itself may not come as any great surprise, the ramifications of the murder spread like ripples on a still pond and affect many others in the small community on the bank of the Mississippi River. One of the enduring questions is how and to what extent the case and its disturbing byways upset the developing relationship between Claire and a local man.

Two dimensions of this novel raise it above the ordinary. One is the author's grasp of the attitudes and sensitivities of several children who appear in the novel with important things to say. The author has a perceptive and accurate sense of Meg, Claire's young daughter, and of the two older Spitzler children.

In spite of the crimes and their consequences illuminated in Dark Coulee, this is a quiet novel, satisfying and well-suited to the Mississippi shores of Wisconsin.

Reviewed by Carl Brookins, February 2003

This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]