Customer Reviews

O'Brien's Desk

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3 star:		(1)
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This is a brilliantly crafted mystery. I stayed up late a couple nights reading this, because it was so hard to put down. Russell weaves a tale so amazing that I was bound to the book until I was finished. Hopefully she will follow up to this book with another. What is almost as impressive as the story itself is the fact that this book was meticulously researched, and historically accurate. The element of truth in this novel makes it all the more compelling. I highly recommend it.

O'Brien's Desk is about a judge in 1923 Toledo who gets married at the age of 59 and then suffers a nervous collapse, and the attempts of his assistant and confidante in the family law courts to find out what the cause of the collapse is and how she can protect him from ever having it happen again. It sells itself as a detective story, but in many ways it's dramatised research. The judge was a real judge; the author is the wife of his real-life grandson; she has a PhD in American Literature and knows what it is to poke around in architves; she was given a set of mysterious scrapbooks by the judge's daughter, her mother-in-law, who thought she'd be interested in them. And it turned out that hidden inside the scrapbook was a real mystery.

The book has a lot of strengths. It's a minutely detailed study of Toledo at the time, as modernizing forces that were at work in the nation at large played out on the local stage. It's always interesting to be reminded that social change, particularly in America, happens one local judgement at a time rather than coming from a single nationwide decision. It is filled with people who are alive in their time, who aren't looking over their shoulders aware that they're in a period novel. See Topsy Turvy for an example in film of what I'm thinking of, though Topsy Turvy I think achieved it even better. In fact, probably the best analogy is with Steven Saylor's early Roman Empire mystery books, which are likewise based on true stories and on exhaustive research.

The weaknesses: really, the book is weighed down by all that research. You can't read it without realising that everything in it was painstakingly found out. A caricatured exchange from the book would have one character saying "You came on the streetcar, then?" and the other replying "Yes, thank goodness there weren't any delays like there have been on other nights this week due to power failures or, on one occasion, a pram on the line." The detail is a huge bonus, but it weighs the book down; essentially, everyone in it is a researcher and they debate the things they research, but actual living, breathing messiness never comes in to bring it to life. (For example, the judge's wife, 30 years younger than him, is a peripheral figure; didn't she care about what was happening? Was there no tension between her and the older woman who'd known him for so much longer and seemed to take such an interest in him?) It's valuable as condensed insight into local politics in the 1920s, and it's interesting family history; but it reads, fairly or unfairly, as too in thrall to the source material, and as such it just isn't quite enough fun.

Set in the 1920's, O'Brien's Desk is a historical mystery based on true events. When one of Ohio's most well-known judges fathers his first and only child, a blackmailer precipitates a chain of events resulting in the judge's near-fatal breakdown. The judge's most trusted friend and colleague, Sarah Kaufman, must unravel the clues behind the machinations. Confronted at every turn by polarized forces ranging from progressive reform vs. political corruption to racial tolerance set against sanctioned bigotry, she learns that the secret of the judge's success lay in balancing and compromising between these forces... a role that eventually made him a target, and now she is next. A thrilling, suspense-filled, and vibrantly told novel.

"O'Brien's Desk," is an historical mystery, a debut novel by Ona Russell, who holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, San Diego. She has published scholarly articles, and taught at various colleges and universities in the San Diego area, and has since published a second novel, The Natural Selection.

The book is set in 1923, Toledo, Ohio. One of the city's most prominent and popular judges, O'Brien O'Donnell, has just married for the first time, at 59; his new, much younger wife soon produces what would be his first and only child. The birth sets off a chain reaction that threatens his life's work and his health. He looks to an associate, Sarah Kaufman, evidently a suffragist, an unconventional, progressive Jewish woman, for help in this crisis.

The novel is based on true events: Russell is the daughter-in-law of the woman who was O'Brien O'Donnell's child: she was given scrapbooks full of news clippings, found, where else, in O'Brien's desk, by her mother-in-law. The writer has also, clearly, done some prodigious research on the country, and, more particularly, that city as it was then. She gives us a sense of how the Volstead Act (Prohibition) influenced the society of the time; of its racism, sexism, and Antisemitism. She is very strong on the particulars of Toledo, too, its suburbs, its industry, its river. She could, I furthermore believe, recite the timetables for the city's streetcars, if asked. Unfortunately, I really enjoyed the history angles of the novel much more than the mystery, which is thin, at best.

Sunstone Press, which is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is given as publisher of this book. I wish they had copy edited it more carefully. It has been named O'Brien's desk, and that desk is a major presence in it, so, wouldn't you expect it would be handled with care every time it appears? Yet, at one point, I found the desk described as "illusive," which is defined as an obsolete variant on "illusory." "Illusory" means, pretty much, imaginary. Huh? Can you imagine an imaginary desk? If the word desired, on the other hand, was "elusive," well, that would mean a desk that was quick on its feet, hard to capture; I find it also rather difficult to imagine such a desk. Can you?

We read this book for our mystery book group and everyone loved it. I especially liked the dialog -- very realistic -- and the 1920s setting. We were lucky enough to meet with the author and she filled us in on Obee and Sarah (both quite real and quite impressive) and how she built the mystery based on Obee's scrapbooks.

This is a must-read for people interested in the time period, Toledo (used to be an important city), mental health treatment, etc. Very well researched, structured and paced.

Since it's a historical mystery, it was informative as well as interesting. It contains all the different aspects of the life of the main character, love, drugs, scandal, friendship, politics, and more. It's fascinating that the book is based partially on facts. The real articles of the main character that the author used to make the book was sewn together beautifully.