What I suppose are becoming known as "exploratory forays" are sidetrips to other mystery books and series that might appeal to/are already popular with other Cat Who... fans. I began by reviewing the first book in Rita Mae Brown's ballyhooed "Sneaky Pie series" (named after Brown's supposed feline co-author), Wish You Were Here, which I thought was all right but was not overly impressed with. Shortly after I posted my review, though, I received an e-mail advising me to stick with the Sneaky Pies for a while longer, since the series improved significantly in the next book. Unfortunately, that e-mail was lost, and I do not recall who sent it, but I'd like to thank its author; I finally got around to picking up the next volume last week, and I found Rest in Pieces significantly more accomplished than its predecessor.
Before I talk about that, though, some other business to dismiss...
Two preface points to my first review, of Carolyn Hart's Yankee Doodle Dead - 1) Despite what the cover would lead you to believe, there is next to nothing about cats in this book. The two that appear are in the story for about five-seven pages and are little more than furniture. I am only including a review of it here as a public service message to warn as many people away from it as possible. 2) Those of you who think my reviews can get too harsh had best skip down to the next part, for I warn you that there will be sheer venom below.
One of the surest ways to ward people off from a book or movie is to spoil the whole plot for them, and I came dangerously close to revealing who shot the corrupt, domineering General Bud Hatch in Yankee Doodle Dead in the first sentence of this review. I eventually decided against doing so (the solution to no mystery should be spoiled, I suppose, no matter how bad the book), but the fact that I contemplated using such drastic measures should scream a definite message - stay away! Yankee Doodle Dead is irredeemable in so many ways that it traverses all individual boundaries of what constitutes badness - the pacing is horrible; the bulk of the supporting characters is ill-defined and indistinguishable; the story of the motives behind the murder, which could've been intriguing and moving in the hands of another author, jumps out of nowhere in the last fifteen pages and is hardly developed at all; and the protagonist, nympho bimbo Annie Darling, precious, incapable of taking anything seriously, and at turns passive-aggressive and bullyingly imperious, is the most distasteful character I've encountered in the mystery realm. (Her buffoonish slacker husband, Max, isn't much better.) It got to the point where I became nigh-completely detached from the story's events and could only ask myself annoyed questions - Why would a community celebrate America's Independence Day with the work of an English poet? Why are career military people always depicted in mysteries as either irrational, control-freak tyrants or messed-up head cases? How could a newcomer - a Yankee newcomer - to such a tightly-knit Southern community gain such ungodly power in such short time? Why are the women of the island hailed as such feminist pioneers when half of them are raring to jump in the sack with Hatch and the other half can't even stand up to him? Why is Bud Hatch considered so bad when Max and Annie are arguably just as intrusive and abusive with their influence and knowledge? (And to what end does the author inject incongruous, clumsy allusions to other mystery series onto every other page? The end result reads like The Onion's faux-sports story parodying the extent of its commercial endorsements - "The Home Depot Cubs took the lead in the top of the Chevy Lumina Second Inning...the hard-fought victory, much like a frost-brewed Budweiser, left a great taste in their mouths...") The author doesn't even allow the reader the pleasure of trying to piece together the "clues", as irrelevant to the eventual solution as they are, himself; the narrative analyzes every single possible way that each tidbit could relate to the crime, so that there's absolutely no...well, mystery to it, leaving all the fun of watching someone else play a video game. The only positive bits in the book are the occasional muddy glimpses of marvelous prose - which here, unfortunately, only serve to illustrate all the more vividly the reasons why Annie's skull should be cracked with a crowbar. Judging from other readers' comments, I seem to have come in on the Death on Demand series on a very sub-par volume, but its insufferable heroine alone is enough to steer me away from it for good. Avoid this book.
Those of you who read the first "exploratory foray" will recall that I had a litany of problems with the first Mrs. Murphy mystery, Wish You Were Here - the plot concerning Harry's dissolved marriage was melodramatic, a lot of the mystery, especially the denouement and the method used to trap the killer, didn't make sense, the pacing was off, most of the supporting characters were two-dimensional, Rita Mae Brown's overly-invoked salt-of-the-earth wisdom got overbearing and hokey, the animals acted too much like humans...
It's all been fixed. I had suspected that some of Wish You Were Here's faults had been the product of first-in-a-series jitters, but I never fathomed that Rita Mae Brown would have such a strong rebound; Rest in Pieces is thoroughly enjoyable book, a pleasure to read that I can recommend without reservation.
It's rather tough to describe the story, since plot points are so gradually revealed at a smartly measured pace that it's very easy to get into spoiler country. Harry Haristeen, postmistress of the small town of Crozet, Virginia, is, like everyone else in the village, gearing up for its autumn harvest festival. Shortly before the festivities, however, Harry's two pets, the no-nonsense Southern belle-ish Mrs. Murphy and the happy-go-lucky Welsh Corgi Tee Tucker, happen upon a strange scent on their property that leads them to a disturbed grave at a small nearby cemetery. Tucker digs to investigate and pulls out...a severed human hand. (In a slightly macabre yet funny scene, Tucker is reluctant to let go of her "deliciously dead" treasure, and Mrs. Murphy has to reason her into relinquishing it - "Listen to me. Humans put their dead in boxes....A human not in a box either he or she was ill and died far away from others or that he or she was murdered. You know how they are, Tucker. Some of them kill for pleasure....It's a sickness among the species. You know, like dogs pass parvo.") Other body parts follow.
Rest in Pieces's mystery is much better than its predecessor's - Brown's penchant for terrific gimmicks to hook the reader, such as Wish You Were Here's eponymous postcards, is still evident, but it's used to greater effect here and has a solid, detailed story behind the crime to follow through on it. (And the use of gore, for one, doesn't seem as vicious as it did in the first book, partially because the shock of finding the severed parts is tempered by the ridiculous situations in which they're discovered.) Happily, Brown doesn't exhaust all her cleverness at the start of the book as she did the first time around; the pacing of plot revelations (and discovery of body parts), save for a couple short tracts where the novel drags for just a bit, is just right. As for the solution, you can probably guess the whodunit's culprit by playing Odd Man Out, but not the full reasons for the murders without a lot of extrapolating. An intriguing human-interest tale, however, lies beneath, however hard-to-divine it is from the clues at hand.
The most welcome surprise, though, is the improvement in Brown's treatment of her characters, concentrating on the folks who deserved more page time in the last book and adding dimension to those who lacked it last time around. Harry's down-to-earth, practical yet good-natured and cheerful character is more thoroughly explored and given proper consideration here; she emerges one of the most appealing mystery heroines out there. Melinda Hogendobber, the firmly-spoken voice of common sense and Biblical conviction, is even more bluntly eloquent here and assumes a rightfully plum major role throughout; the narrative finally gives her due respect. While still a spoiled brat, shades of other aspects to Little Marilyn Sanburne's character - and creeping second thoughts about her hereditary snobbery - seep through when she's outside of her upper-crust environment. And Harry's ex-husband, Fair, though he's still in deep mental muck, is no longer the aimless, floundering midlife-crisis feeb we were introduced to - Brown probes his mindset and his regrets and gives us glimpses of a person who is good at heart despite some wrong choices. Mrs. Murphy's logic, while still expressed in human terms, evidences more of a feline thought process to it (as exemplified by her conversation to Tucker about the hand); all the "talking" animals, in fact, seem truer to their inherent natures and are finally as enchanting as Brown wishes them to be. Even society matron Mim Sanburne is less of an overt pill in the latter half of the book. (The only character who's devolved is Boom Boom, who's gone from fairly capable in Wish You Were Here to the precious, gold-digging bimbo I feared Brown'd paint her as in the first book.) And there's a nice addition to the cast in the form of New York City-expatriate model Blair Bainbridge, honest, sensible, and humble as I am sure no model is, who proves a pleasant match for Harry. Relationships, too, are more realistically rendered; the angst Harry and Fair have about their ended marriage, the stuff of soap operas in the first book, is realistic and palpable here, and the growing closeness between Harry and Blair is happily natural and unforced. (Brown's attempted subtheme concerning the unfortunate consequences of judging by appearances isn't as well thought-out and doesn't fare as well, though. It would've worked in Wish You Were Here, where everybody seemed class-conscious, but there's only one person in Rest in Pieces to whom the moral applies (big Mim), the rest of the cast either totally untainted by snobbery or (as with Little Marilyn) becoming uncomfortable with it.)
As for the town of Crozet itself, I felt that it was never initially developed to the point where it could come to life in my mind (in part because it was undermined by the social sniping rampant in the first book), and that's still half-true here. Some locales did make an impression on me - Crozet's post office and the easy village chit-chat that took place there; Harry's expansive yet cozy farm and its environs, especially the dreary little hidden cemetery; and the setting for the fox hunt, which evokes the Virginia landscape very well. But no other places were very vividly rendered, and I can't visualize the neighborhood of Crozet as I can, say, Pickax. The community of Crozet, however, which is arguably more important, is made very much real through the supportive network of friendships between Harry, Mrs. Hogendobber, and next-door shopkeep Market at the post office and Harry and Blair at home, and through them I was able to take the town to heart. A stronger sense of physical place, however, would endear Crozet to me more.
Finally - and astonishingly - Brown's pearls of down-home wisdom did not drive me up the wall this time. They're still laid on fairly thickly in the first third of the book but taper off afterwards, appearing thereafter ungratuitously and only when appropriate and effective - Chapter 35's take on Harry's philosophy of life, for example, is actually touching in its half-romantic, half-pragmatic clarity. The trick, I think, is that Brown finds here the sense of temperance and subtlety missing in Wish You Were Here - curbing the first book's tendency to go from one extreme of mood to the other to hammer everything home to the reader, the author makes the desired points through example or simple statement, knowing when to turn on the humor and cutesiness and when to pause to ponder, and the effect is gently winning. Brown has finally struck the appropriate balance between the whimsical and the serious in her material, resulting in what finally feels like a unified, effortlessly flowing story.
Rest in Pieces is not as good as the best Cat Who...s, but it darn well beats most everything else in the cat-mystery genre, and it's encouraging to see this premise finally live up to its potential. After I read Wish You Were Here, I never envisioned saying this, but I'm looking forward to the next Mrs. Murphy mystery, and I hope it maintains Rest in Pieces's high standard.
A note: the book, despite an essentially good-humored nature, does contain the full gamut of four(and more)-letter words, used sporadically but used nonetheless. And there is the aforementioned gore, which is more Halloweenish than repulsive, might still be disturbing for younger audiences. Though the book contains many elements which would prove charming to all ages, I'd recommend the book as a whole only for those 13 or above.
Cat in the Dark, by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, was a complete impulse buy at the supermarket (which explains why my trek into the series started with the fourth volume and not the first). It proved very interesting, and I plan on reading Murphy's other books in the future, even if Dark does contain two major flaws.
The feline heroes, Joe Grey and Dulcie, are descended from an ancient Celtic race blessed with the ability to speak - not the thought transmission-type cat-talk used by Mrs. Murphy that's comprehendable only by other animals, but actual out-loud human speech. They've lived with some understanding humans in the California seaside town of Molena Point, their abilities hidden, but their existence is endangered with the arrival of another of their race, the malevolent Azrael, who, along with Greeley, his human companion (the word "master" being inappropriate; Azrael is far more the master of Greeley than the other way around), has been pulling a string of late-night burglaries in local shops. Joe and Dulcie seek to stop them, but the situation is touchy; Azrael and Greeley are cagey, and apprehending either will surely expose their own secrets, bringing their lives crashing down as well...
Now, Greeley, an often-drunken old man who can hardly believe he's found a talking cat but who is greedy and opportunistic enough to take full advantage of the situation, and the pompous, mysterious, high-talking Azrael have the makings of splendid antagonists. They have amoral menace. They have an ingenious, seemingly unstoppable method of committing crimes that presents a stiff challenge for the heroes, and arresting them poses the possibility of great personal loss (not only to the cats, but to lonely friend of the heroes Mavity Flowers; Greeley is her brother and one of her few living relatives). They have, as glimpsed in a couple scenes, an intriguingly symbiotic relationship - two loner lowlifes who've stumbled into each other and a means to wealth along the way. The two are engaged in a perpetual power struggle (every conversation between them is like a back-and-forth argument), but they zealously stick together and watch each other's backs, not only for mutual self interest, but to protect their sad form of friendship. They are about as good and original as mystery villains get.
They are also, unfortunately, completely wasted. A third of the way through, the author decides that this story is not about an old man-and-cat team of burglars; this story is about an insurance-fraud scheme. And it's a good insurance-fraud tale in theory, but it's not told well in this book; sandwiched between the eventual remnants of the Azrael-Greeley plotline and other happenings, it's often murky and not easy to understand in detail. It's too bad, for the basic plot was sound and clever at points (and would've been at home in a Cat Who... or Mrs. Murphy; it'd been nice to have seen who those two series would've done with it) and deserved a decent showcase. Murphy should've decided at the start which mystery plotline to stick with and develop.
That's Cat in the Dark's first problem. The second is the book's romance-novel sensibilities. The prose, while capable in other respects, often goes all flowery and eye-rollingly moony (description of Azrael, page 13: "A huge beast. Black as sin....broad of shoulder, solid as a panther."). So many situations (such as many of Azrael's threats) are inappropriately romanticized and undermined, robbing them of the tension they would've had otherwise. A subplot concerning Dulcie being repulsed yet attracted by Azrael got tiresome very quickly, as did the author's constant reminders during the Joe-Dulcie-Azrael confrontations that "no tom would hurt a queen". (The female cats are always described as "queens", in regard to their sexual functions.) At worst, the three principle felines are reduced to romance-novel clichés - Joe Grey, the dashing and stalwart white knight committed to justice and ever-ready to defend his woman; Dulcie, the demure, vulnerable, and pure of heart heroine, considering herself the property of her man yet helpless and sinfully tempted by the bad-boy stranger's advances; Azrael, the cunning and leering but wickedly, dangerously alluring evil adversary...groan.
A disturbing side-effect of this is how the book equates beauty with goodness (and, vice versa, lack of it with ill intent). On the one hand, the author creates a completely reprehensible character, a scheming, conceited accomplice in high crimes, yet seems completely enchanted with her - poring over how prettily she sleeps, reverently detailing her attractiveness in every paragraph of every scene she's in. (The author doesn't try to excuse the character's actions with her beauty and does think her despicable, but seems to strangely harbor a parallel idea that, despite everything, we should also be entranced with this creature for her exquisite good looks.) Conversely, a couple of characters pop up who are overweight and less-than-cultured but do prove to have honest intentions; the author cannot stop herself, though, from shoving her repugnance at their appearances in the reader's face, inserting snide asides into every other sentence, and gives them particularly malicious and humiliating deaths. Murphy's like an impolite guest staring at a mole on her host's face - it's only natural to notice the imperfection once, but after a while of her fixating on it, you wanna whack her upside the head and tell her to get over it and mind her manners.
So, what _did_ draw me to Cat in the Dark in spite of the aforementioned problems? Well, for one, Molena Point; maybe I'm just a sucker for seaside towns, but the book's environment - the seaside cottages, the charming, not-too-touristy main street lined with little shops, vegetation, and public benches, the layout and closeness of the little town, with its low, well-established buildings that're friendly and sheltering yet open to the elements - just called to me. Murphy effectively includes a few scenes with the characters wandering alone through the town exploring at night, the village so familiar and yet so cloaked in mystery. Even the back alleys that Joe and Dulcie frequent and fly through on their investigations take on a character of their own.
And you can tell that Murphy can be a very good writer indeed when she gets away from all the romance stuff. (Hey, anyone who can think up of Azrael and Greeley, even if the characters are poorly implemented, has to have a goodly amount of talent.) Besides the descriptions of Molena Point, a few memorable scenes pop to mind involving the discovery of a gory body, the morbidly admirable detail taking both the corpse and the passage to the realm of surrealistic art, and an account of a car crash with an effective dreamlike point-of-view.
The humans in the story range from great-but-too-short character studies (Greeley) to semi-sympathetic characters (Mavity and Bruce, Joe's human, who's hassled by planned renovations on his dream place and the peculiarities of harboring a talking cat) to people who aren't particularly compelling here but at least they don't get in the way (nearly everyone else) to a few of cartoonishly-drawn stereotype villains with nothing to do but be aggressively obnoxious to the heroes for no apparent reason. (I notice the latter type of characters popping up more and more in cozy mysteries and consider the cheap and shoddy emotional manipulation they represent an insult to my intelligence.) Murphy seems to keep a distance from much of her human cast, and from her tone, I would guess that's because she sees no further development in them necessary this time around, perhaps since she thinks she's explored them thoroughly in previous volumes. Preoccupation with the Azrael and insurance-scam material also probably contributed significantly.) Not a conclusion I'd agree with, but the main human characters seem well-established here, even if they aren't given enough to do, and such circumstances seem to hold the promise of better characterization of the regulars in other books.
Despite its missteps, I am planning on reading the rest of the Joe Grey series on the basis of Cat in the Dark; this one books holds great potential, and I hope that the others will realize it.
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