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Families contain interesting relationships and dynamics. So do extended families. Author Ellen Hart, a powerful, thoughtful, writer of mysteries that often examine relations and the influence of evil, has penned another one. Beginning with an evocative well-designed cover, DEATH ON A SILVER PLATTER plucks the reader by the hand on the very first page, draws one inexorably in and doesn't let go until the very end. This is another episode in the apparently never-ending saga of Twin Cities restaurant reviewer Sophie Greenway. Greenway is fortunate to have a creator with such a fertile active mind. Families often have issues, internally and without their borders. Such issues, bound up in familial affections and history, sometimes take years to grow and fester into powerful explosions. Sophie and her husband, Bram Baldric, a local radio talk-show host, are making some renovations to the dowager hotel in the center of St. Paul they call home. A burst water pipe in a sub-basement sends Sophie's maintenance crew scrambling. They unearth a long-forgotten steel box containing a diary and some love letters belonging to Sophie's mother, Pearl. The diary reveals an unknown link between Pearl and the parents of Elaine Veeland. Elaine is a long-time girl friend of Sophie's and is the successful CEO of her father's log home manufacturing business. Sophie is scheduled to review a new restaurant, something she does on a professional level. But this review is complicated by the fact that she is well-known to the owner and chef, a former lover. Sophie dons a disguise and for further camouflage, takes Elaine a dinner companion. It is at this dinner that the seeds of coming conflicts are planted. Elaine tells Sophie that her mother, a compelling, if loathsome creature, has called a family conference of Elaine and her two brothers to reveal the future of the family corporation. Naturally, all three siblings have differing ideas on the future direction of their father's creation. What devolves is a complicated, tortuous tale in which few of the eighteen major characters come away with clean hands. It is a tribute to the author that she is able to sustain distinctive voices for everyone and is able to keep the tangling threads of the affairs Veeland and Sophie's own extended family etched clearly in the readers' minds. We are compelled to continue reading, even when some of the characters are appalling in their flawed existence and actions. But it is clear in the end that the author has met her goal of carving away the veneer of civilized behavior and revealing what often lies beneath the false smiles of family gatherings. An excellent novel.
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, January 2004
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