|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
In TRAIL OF THE SPELLMANS, the fifth installment (or "Document #5") of her popular Spellman Files series, Lisa Lutz's hard-drinking, wise-cracking P.I. Isabel (Izzy) Spellman has her hands full dealing with several compromising surveillance jobs, a house-sitting assignment for an OCD mathematics professor, and all-out chaos at home. Which is, of course, what makes it fun. Much in the vein of a Carl Hiaasen caper, Lutz's Spellman novels are delightfully humorous romps, more about the zany characters and their convoluted mishaps than about any serious investigation. For those new to the series, a little background: Izzy, a former rabble-rouser and incorrigible snoop, has been an investigator in her family's San Francisco business since the age of twelve. She shares her caseload with her parents and also her college-age sister, Rae, who not only seems bored at work these days, but has inexplicably begun to fake her surveillance reports. Then there's Izzy's older brother David, once an "excessively fashionable," type-A lawyer who has now given up his career to be a stay-at-home dad for his eighteen-month-old daughter. This time around, we find Izzy juggling three or four loosely interconnected mini-mysteries (some professional, some not) which give the story a bit of structure around the ongoing family drama. Among other upheavals, the Spellman parents now have a new household member: Demetrius Merriweather, ('D') a former client who was wrongfully imprisoned on a murder charge for fifteen years. Rather than pursue a lucrative lawsuit against the state, however, D spends his time baking delicious treats that then must be locked away from Izzy's dieting father. Additionally, her relationship with San Francisco cop (and live-in boyfriend) Henry Stone is threatened by the prospect of a 'serious talk,' that Izzy continually dodges by going on drinking bouts with her new friend, Henry's mother. Add to that her toddler niece inexplicably referring to everything as 'banana,' her harried brother throwing Rae out of his guest house for reasons that neither sibling will explain, and her mother's sudden craze for jam-packing her days with Russian lessons, book clubs, and crafts, and you get a sense of the dizzying antics that Lutz seamlessly integrates into one sitcom-esque novel. Although the family back-story is central to the plot of TRAIL OF THE SPELLMANS, new readers to the series need not worry about jumping into the fray mid-series. Important family history is folded neatly into the current plot, and Izzy peppers her 'file' with snarky explanatory footnotes, as well as an appendix with dossiers on each of the primary characters. And while none of the discoveries that she makes throughout the novel are even remotely surprising to the reader, the overall narrative about Izzy's relationship with her family and the family business does reach a watershed moment at the book's conclusion. In this way, TRAIL OF THE SPELLMANS feels like a transitional installment in the series—a lighthearted bridge between the more fully developed plots that have preceded it, and the inevitable drama to come. § Larissa Kyzer lives in Brooklyn. She will complete her Master's degree in Library Science in May 2011.
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer, March 2012
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
