Customer Reviews

Death and the Walking Stick: A Trudy Roundtree Mystery

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There isn't much violent crime in the Georgia town Ogeechee (pop 3,000) so when octogenarian Althea Boatright runs over Charles Sykes of Jesup, Georgia the police think it is an accident due to poor eyesight, poor motor coordination and her dog sleeping on the gas pedal. They yank her license but don't put her in jail. A few days later Althea is found dead in her home; chief of police Henry Huckabee concludes she fell and hit her head against the bathtub.

One of Althea's friends feels that she was murdered because the walking stick she always used was nowhere near her body and the one in the house was not owned by the deceased. Police officer Trudy Roundtree listens to the women, especially her boss's mother and concludes they might be right. Althea was not on good terms with her son and daughter-in-law who feel they were cheated in his father's will because he left everything to his wife. Further investigation finds that the car accident might have been homicide; to find the killer requires setting a dangerous trap.

Linda Berry has written a charming down home cozy that displays life in a small southern town. Trudy is a dedicated police officer who protects and serves the community but listens to the theory put forth by Althea's friends that she was murdered. When she believes they have a point, she convinces her boss to let her investigate and finds evidence to support their claims. DEATH AND THE WALKING STICK showcases the talent of the author whose tale rivals the best of superstars like Leslie Glass and Susan Wittig Albert.

Harriet Klausner

Linda Berry's DEATH AND THE WALKING STICK is a light enjoyable small town mystery read with a fun progressive female sleuth that will bring laughs along with the fun puzzle of the murder mystery itself.

No one in the small town of Ogeechee, Georgia likes Althea Boatright! Epitaphs like turkey buzzard are more than fitting. The final straw finally came. With her aging eyesight and her little dog tangled at her feet causing a distraction, the cantankerous, annoying Althea runs down a pedestrian with her car. Her latest escapade finally allows police officer Trudy Roundtree to confiscate Althea's license. This should make the whole town relieved but instead, Althea turns up dead in her own home. Could this be an accident? Lulu, Martha and Ellen think Althea was murdered when a walking stick is discovered at the scene --- a walking stick that does not belong to Althea. Trudy and the bridge club ladies investigate as more and more secrets of Althea's life are uncovered, secrets that might have provoked murder.

In DEATH AND THE WALKING STICK, Linda Berry mixes a the small town southern atmosphere with a progressive, feminist sleuth who has both compassion and humor. Trudy Roundtree captures the southern way of life with a sense of gentleness in her vision of others even as she remains partially separate. Trudy Roundtree makes fun of people and the town yet her humor is never mean but born from a love of Ogeechee and its residents. Rather than taking offense, Southern readers are more likely to smile and relocated Southerners, like myself, are likely to feel a tad homesick. The mystery itself is a fun, light read with some surprises as small town gossip and small town newspaper stories come to the surface, sometimes in conflict. DEATH AND THE WALKING STICK delves into the past and past secrets, creating a multi-dimensional history for her characters and the setting. Although not a cold case mystery like her DEATH AND THE ICEBOX, DEATH AND THE WALKING STICK will appeal to fans of cold case mysteries. Linda Berry's DEATH AND THE WALKING STICK is a wonderful folksy light mystery read laced with gentle humor.

Linda Berry, Death and the Walking Stick (Wheeler Publishing, 2005)

Here's a quick hint for those of you who set reading goals for yourself: if you really want to crank up the page count, I have three words for you: large print books. I picked up the large-print version of this one from the library by mistake, and it's almost twice the page count of the regular paperback. Woo!

In any case, it's got the same content. Still trying to figure out quite how I feel about said content. Berry's head honcho, Trudy Roundtree, is a small-town cop in the southern United States, which is seemingly a hotbed of all sorts of strange crimes. (One detects a scent of southern-fried Murder, She Wrote.) In this episode, Althea Boatright, crotchety old woman, runs over an old man, claiming that her dog got in the way of her feet and she couldn't brake properly. Which is all well and good, and the police are trying to find a way to get her out from behind the wheel legally, when Althea herself keels over. Thanks to a coffeeklatsch full of nosy neighbors, Trudy allows herself to be convinced that Althea's death is a bit more than it seems, and the investigation is on.

Combining the cozy with the police procedural doesn't really strike me as the best possible idea, but for what it's worth, Berry makes the best of it she can by going heavy on the cozy and light on the police procedural (with most of the police-procedural style details, amusingly, given us by the police chief's mother, a woman who's never even seen, let alone read, a Lawrence Sanders novel. This is a good thing). Still, the mixture jars a bit, kind of like eating mustard ice cream; it's perfect for connoisseurs, but the rest of the world will find the idea somewhat revolting. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't try mustard ice cream. It is a beautiful thing.) Done correctly, it is pure balm. Here, however, it's not quite correct; while not completely predictable, it's predictable in its unpredictability. The red herrings are so obvious they might as well have pictures of fish tattooed on their forearms, most of the characters are just this side of stereotypical, and while Berry gives us some tantalizing peeks into the deeper lives of some of her characters, she never fleshes them out enough to turn these folks into real three-dimensional people the reader can care about.

Decent genre mystery, but not good enough to send me rushing back to the library for the next installment. ** ½