Customer Reviews

Close Quarters

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If your only enjoyment of mysteries is figuring out "who done it," Close Quarters probably isn't for you. But if you enjoy witty characters and an hilarious running commentary on contemporary life among the yuppies, Nina Fischman will delight you. Reading Piesman is like having a marathon phone conversation with your old college roomate, if your college roomate was this funny.

Toward the end of CLOSE QUARTERS, the heroine, Nina Fischman, observes that she is long on character, short on plot. Therein you have the key to this book. Nina, a housing authority lawyer in Manhattan who is single and nearing forty, is funny and intelligent; especially, she is very witty without indulging in the annoying wisecracks that other mystery writers think are so darn cute and stand in for character. Nina is genuinely nice, not abrasive. She is very real, the product of a working class Jewish family and a state university education. In CLOSE QUARTERS, she engages in a very New York tradition of the communal summer beach rental, this one on Fire Island, a social institution she sends up by merely describing it as it is. It is a setting peopled with types who beg to be murdered.

The plot is about as thin as you can get. There is a single dead body that turns up early and without fanfare, and our heroine really does not get around to sleuthing until four-fifths through the book. Since this book is long on character, we know who did not do it and who has motive and the killer instinct long before the characters get to it. Police procedure is out the window, in fact, so are the police for that matter. We are told, we do not see that people are questioned. Forget forensics; the beach house and murder scene are not cordoned off and the remaining housemates continue their summer activities inhibited only by inclement weather.

If you leave out the murder mystery, you still have a satisfying book. In fact, it might have been more satisfying if there had been no attempt to make it a crime novel; instead, with a little more energy put into the dynamics of the beach rentals, it could have been a wickedly comic novel. Nina is a pleasure to spend time with and the phone conversation with her mother is priceless. This book stands alone quite well; I understand it is part of a series but there is no sense that the author expects you to read the rest of it to get what's going on here.

This is the first time that I read anything from this author and I found the book to be okay. It was well written but it definitely was not a good mystery. The characters and situations explored were interesting.

I gave this book two stars because I did like Nina Fischman and her outlook on life. Other than that, it's one of the worst "mysteries" I've ever read. Almost no sleuthing goes on until about 85% of the way through, and then the killer gives up himself/herself in a Scooby-Doo-type pat ending.

No twist; no surprise, really.

Most of the novel is just Nina talking about men and her weight and her Jewishness. Perhaps this would be better read as a Bridget Jones's Diary.

A neurotic 40 year old New York Jewess explores all hers & acquaintances neuroses badly. Since I am a well adjusted older protestant from California, it leaves me absolutely cold! The murder & solving of it are secondary to all of the introspection which is juvenile.