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Who murdered Callie Trimble, and what was the motive? Seeking the answers momentarily takes Saint Paul (Minnesota) Patrol Sergeant Leona Reese's mind off her own problems. The second of the two questions seems to be the easier to answer. But the solution to it still does not identify the killer, not even when a name is found — though the sociopath (one realizes in retrospect) has been in plain sight from nearly the start of the case. Here is an investigation where logic would have possibly yielded results as quickly as all the legwork and computer searching expended. A ten-year veteran of the force, Leo (as everyone calls her) faces reassignment from the streets to a desk job after mysteriously failing her mandatory marksmanship test a second time. But in an unusual move, her chief uses the opportunity to reassign her temporarily to Minnesota's Department of Human Services local office, short an investigator into irregularities at the various facilities under its jurisdiction. With her inept new boss giving her virtually no training in department procedures, Leo lands immediately in the murder case on what was supposed to be a routine field assignment, her first, to look into the death in a Minneapolis assisted living facility. Callie Trimble was suffering from the onset of a form of senile dementia. The obvious suspects are her lover, Eleanor Sinclair, who found the dead woman in her own bed, or Callie's son, Ted Trimble, a tax professional. Leo, however, becomes increasingly convinced that the culprit is someone associated with the facility itself. She knocks heads a bit with the two Minneapolis police detectives assigned to the case, but in general the police officers work closely with each other, sharing information. Leo gains a useful backup at Human Services in the person of wheelchair-bound Thom Thoreson, a thorough professional who does not let his disability deter him from achieving his goals or stifle his outgoing personality. Meantime, Leo herself seeks medical advice, finally convinced there must be a physical explanation why she has failed her shooting quals. (She rejects outright a repeated suggestion that her problem is psychologically tied to a previous case in which she fired, not fatally, on a teenage hoodlum.) To her dismay, the physician discovers that she is suffering from a cancerous tumor on her right eyeball and it must be attended to promptly. Adding to her stress, her lover, a lawyer, has been assigned a courtroom case that is almost certainly headed into conviction of her likely innocent client and an uncertain future with her law firm. The cast of characters is wide and uniformly interesting: police officers, assisted living staff members, Eleanor's former school students, Human Services personnel, even (late in the case) members of a Russian Orthodox Church. Clues to the truth are fairly presented to the reader, and the trail to the identification of the killer involves no sleights of hand. One mystery does remain for me. I am totally missing the significance of the novel's title. It would seem to refer to Eleanor, but one ends up admiring her pluck as much as one does Leo's and, in a different way, Thom's. § Drewey Wayne Gunn is professor emeritus of Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He is currently editing a collection of scholarly essays on 1960s, GAY PULP FICTION: THE MISPLACED HERITAGE.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, February 2012
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