Amazon.com Review
Oil geologist and reluctant crime solver Em Hansen is one of the most interesting characters in recent mystery fiction--a strong woman with believable weaknesses and none of the smugness or coyness that bog down heroines of other, better-selling series. At the start of her fourth book, Sarah Andrews has Em helping her distant mother deliver a calf on the family ranch in Wyoming and wondering about her career choices: "If I hadn't found my own way to the edge, life might have been quite different for me. I might have had what it took to stay on my parents' ranch, or found myself married up to a neighboring spread, instead of heading off into these other lives of mine...." Luckily for us, Em's other lives--chronicled so sharply in
A Fall in Denver,
Tensleep, and
Mother Nature--all available in paperback--make for rewarding reading. The latest book begins with an offer from a patronizing ex-boss to help the unemployed Em find a job--if she will try to discover why his 16-year-old daughter, Cecilia, is having such a hard time getting over the suspicious death of her mother. Em has to dig deeply into Cecilia's repressed memory and the dead woman's heartbreaking journals before some glimpse of the truth is revealed--and her search is suspenseful, poignant, and surprisingly sensual.
--Dick Adler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
After a few more cases, geologist Em Hansen may be as tough as the best of her sleuthing peers, but her vulnerability offers singular pleasures to current readers. In her fourth appearance (Mother Nature, 1997), unemployed Em is asked by J.C. Menken, a millionaire oilman and her former boss, to look into his wife's death. Miriam Menken had taken their teen-aged daughter, Cecilia, to Wyoming for the summer and was murdered. It's not so much that J.C. wants to find the killer as that he wants to understand what happened. Cecilia witnessed the murder but can't remember a thing, and even her psychologist doesn't seem able to help her. Leaving the cocoon of her family ranch, also in Wyoming, Em finds herself plunged into the tangle of another family's life just as she's adjusting to the recent death of her own father. She uncovers boxes of Miriam's journals, kept since college, and discovers that she, too, was hiding from her own past and unhappiness. It may be that a former lover, the charismatic Chandler, couldn't stay in the past, or Miriam could have been done in by her Wyoming landlord. But the two nefarious characters hanging around J.C.'s office stir Em's suspicions while she's wondering why Miriam's college friends are suddenly becoming so secretive. Andrews handles these possibilities with a sure hand as she introduces an endless supply of secondary characters whose company is a delight. Thoughtful and uncertain, Em is especially appealing as she makes the quiet point that murder involves more than flesh and bones.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
