Customer Reviews

Gingerbread Man

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Ms. Healy is a deft and experienced storyteller. Her first published novel, "Gingerbread Man" is proof of her abilities. It offers a complex weaving of storylines between a mother's search for her missing child, a dectective's tragic losses and the saga of a family of Travelers. For comic relief we are offered segments of a novel written by the detective which features a stumble-tongued policeman.

"Gingerbread Man" suffers here and there with stilted dialogue, but I wouldn't let that deter anyone from reading it. The story and its multiple settings more than make up for such a minor flaw.

Mary Lou Healy uses her extensive writing background to provide us with a wonderfully complex story of romance and intrigue. This is a fast-paced novel, great for the beach, passing time on the train, or to slip into your bag for vacation. It transports you to another world -- the life of the an American "Traveler-clan" which are something like grifters and small time con-artist, yet in the Gingerbread Man they move beyond petty theft all the way to murder. Marylou has written this clan so well, it makes me wonder everytime I walk into a dusty lil' antique store selling homemade preserves.

It's wonder, romantic and a fun read.

American culture has hoisted personal identity to a new epitome of holiness. ID theft is akin to soul-stealing, it seems, and violating personal privacy is a taboo to be crossed only at great peril. Mary Lou Healy's Gingerbread Man explores a similar identity subject; the Child Gone Missing. Healy has managed to sensitively genre-meld the study of a young widow's grief with a widowed detective who shares a similar loss.
Three points of view take the reader through the eyes of the child's mother, a private investigator and the woman kidnapper. These seem stock characters--except for the kidnapper, who is a Traveler or American gypsy. Healy gives these stock characters new life and idiosyncrasies, although the mother initially comes off rather more like a hapless heroine in a romance novel.
Gingerbread Man is set apart from other genre novels by a neat literary device: the PI is an ironic writer whose cop hero is noted for his magnificent malapropisms. Portions of these novels are interspersed through Gingerbread Man and serve as an amuse bouche to the more serious--even horrifying--plot developments. I loved this cop, and wished there was an entire novel focusing on Steele Everhardt. Oh, and the pace of Gingerbread Man picks up until we have a first-class cliff-hanging (literally) thriller.

Gingerbread Man has a little bit of something for everyone. You'll find humor in this mystery as well as a very touching love story. The storytelling is wonderful! Everyone will enjoy!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book because not only is it an interesting mystery story, but the comic relief in the "book within the book" is just so much fun. Mary Lou ties her characters together with a deft hand, from the heroine who starts reading a light book to help her relax during the trying time of her son's kidnapping, to the hero cop who wrote it, to the band of kidnappers and their individual stories. This is a very good read!