Customer Reviews

The Replacement Child: A Mystery

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

 

 

Even as the sadness at the loss of Tony Hillerman is still fresh and painful, a worthy candidate as his successor has appeared. It seems as though he passed the mantle to Christine Barber personally: she's the first winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize.

In a story that could have come directly from his journalistic origins, Barber gives us Lucy Newroe, the Santa Fe Capital Tribune night editor who gets a strange and seemingly untraceable tip from an elderly lady who monitors the police band radio. Scanner Lady has heard something that may indicate police involvement with a crime, but everywhere Lucy turns there's a stone wall or worse. She gets the distracted attention of Detective Gil Montoya, but he's in deep with his own problem. A popular local schoolteacher has been thrown off the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge outside Taos. Could her rumor and his case have something in common?

This book chews up the Southwestern scenery and embraces the cultural quirks and characters that are New Mexico. Wouldn't you just know that Lucy is the type who compulsively returns misplaced items in the grocery store to their rightful place?

The richness of New Mexico's territorial history is just beneath the surface here, as well. This has all the hallmarks of Hillerman at his best.

I had entered my mystery novel in the Tony Hillerman Contest last year and was beaten out by "The Replacement Child." I was really hoping I'd hate the book, but it's a rich tale of woe and loss set in the sweeping New Mexico desert. It is easy to see why it won.

This was a great book. I do live in New Mexico and happened upon this in the Collected Works bookstore in Santa Fe and bought it on a lark, even though I'm not a huge mystery reader. But this book just caught my attention because it's not just a mystery ... I love all the fantastic descriptions of people and places in the Land of Enchantment. The mystery itself is quirky and fast-paced and interwoven beautifully with the culture and idiosyncracies of this area. I passed it along to my mother, who also loved The Replacement Child. I hope we'll see more from this author.

I really do hope the author will consider writing another book about Santa Fe. This book was interesting and gives you an idea what it is like to be in Santa Fe and New Mexico. I was not able to put down this book and was lucky enough to be able to read it during a recent trip to Santa Fe, NM. Wonderful book by a new author who resides in New Mexico!

The characters, plot and amazing descriptions drew me in and kept me interested until the end!

This was a pretty average mystery story. Now, I'll admit I am not a huge mystery fan, but this one had a few too many convoluted side plots. The reason I picked this up in the first place was because of the setting. I love Santa Fe and consider it home although I do not live there now. Christine Barber has an excellent grasp of the Santa Fe culture and her descriptions of the places of the area were wonderful - from the cramped adobes of the old city to the beauty of the Plaza and the mcmansions of Eldorado. She knows the people too, the wise old Hispano families and the new, trying-too-hard Anglos. As I said the story is just okay - read this book for a real story of Santa Fe.

I got this for my mother-in-law. Her comment: "It was a good read, but I don't see why it won an award." It does have a lot of twists and turns, but I guess she was looking for something insightful. But maybe that's expecting too much from a mystery novel. (On the other hand, Dean Koontz's "Odd Thomas" series is both a good mystery and also a tender portrayal of a gentle human, so maybe it's not asking too much.)

For a first novel, it's pretty darn good, though. One I'd be proud to have written myself.

While Tony Hillerman probably didn't invent the subgenre of detective mysteries featuring a specific regional location and culture (I'm thinking of Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles, Loren Estleman and Detroit, James Lee Burke and The Big Easy ... ), his name certainly has become synonymous with the Southwestern whodunit over the last three decades.

And with the 2007 inception of The Hillerman Prize, administered through Wordharvest Writers Workshops in Santa Fe for a previously unpublished manuscript "in the Hillerman tradition," Hillerman is sure to remain the standard-bearer for years to come.

The first winner of The Hillerman Prize (which includes publication) spent 10 years as an assistant city editor, columnist and features writer at the Santa Fe New Mexican, as well as stints at the Albuquerque Journal and the Gallup Independent, and her knowledge of the City Different shines throughout her debut novel.

The Replacement Child, by Christine Barber, certainly fits the bill for being "in the Hillerman tradition"-- it is less about the gory details of the crime and more about the problem solving that leads to its resolution.

Loaded with detail about Santa Fe and northern New Mexico, including digressions on everything from the "holy" dirt at Chimayo to the history of a family land grant in Galisteo, the mishmash architecture in the neighborhoods near the Plaza to the different ways the locals make their bizcochitos, Barber has brought a sharp eye to many of the little details long-time residents often take for granted.

The Replacement Child is also a thoroughly original take on the genre, featuring a protagonist in polar opposition to the Navajo Tribal Police officers Hillerman has seared into the consciousness of the reading public.

Capital Tribune night editor Lucy Newroe is a couple years shy of 30 and way behind in any sort of general maturing process. Her frequent drunken escapades with her coworkers at the Cowgirl in the wee hours, the pile of fast-food trash cluttering her car, her discourse on an accomplished but very cynical flirtation practice specifically designed to destroy ("A man who assumes that women must kneel in worship when faced with his magnetism can be tortured into a bloody, humble pulp with charm and the right words,") all provide a compelling picture of someone who plays with fire with little thought of getting burned.

Lucy is smart and curious, but she has perhaps a more elevated opinion of herself than is warranted, considering some of the grave mistakes she makes in following the trajectory of two seemingly unrelated murders the paper is covering. Her moment of redemption, an essential component of any character as flawed as Lucy, is long in coming but brings with it the necessary and satisfying shock to Lucy's psyche.

And while surprise twists abound, none is perhaps as satisfying to the reader than Lucy's growing awareness that, beyond congratulating herself for being right about some crucial elements to the investigations, she was also deeply--even fatally--wrong about others.

A call to the newsroom late at night by a frequent caller known as Scanner Lady--an elderly woman who listens to a police scanner--starts the story in motion, as Lucy tries to get more information about a mysterious conversation between police officers that Scanner Lady relates.

Finely drawn characters abound, from Detective Gil Montoya, who still eats dinner with his mother in Galisteo every afternoon while his wife and daughters manage their own busy schedules without him, to Patsy Burke, cop's widow, bridge player and grandmother who is thinking of applying for a job at Hobby Lobby along with her colorful neighbor Claire.

Montoya is investigating the murder of Melissa Baca, a private school teacher found at the bottom of the Taos Gorge, and has little time to devote to Lucy's theories about how it might somehow be connected to her phone call from Scanner Lady. But when Lucy, on
a volunteer medic run with an EMT she has a crush on, finds herself stumbling onto another murder scene, she goes into overdrive trying to connect it to the Baca case.

Complicating the Baca case are the victim's own relatives, including Barber's devastating portrait of Mrs. Baca, a devout Norteno who has already lost a son to heroin addiction and her policeman husband to the dangers of his job. Her other son, also a cop, remains under a cloud of suspicion in his sister's death. And a packet of incriminating polaroids (somewhat unlikely in the these days of My Space and digipix and so one of the few times Barber seems to falter in her plotting) takes Detective Montoya on a seemingly diversionary wild goose chase in the latter half of the book.

Barber does a fine job of tying up all the loose ends in a realistic and timely fashion, and she's also very skillfully created some tentative relationships that could have staying power in a follow-up, should a series be in her future. Since she is currently pursuing a career in medicine in Albuquerque, though, it's anyone's guess whether Barber will follow in her mentor's footsteps.

I'm usually more of a thriller reader than a mystery reader, but this novel had such a strong sense of place and a laconic, but perfectly and wonderfully New Mexican pacing and warm storytelling with touches of humor that it totally won me over. This book reminds me a lot of the awesome #1 Ladies Detective Agency series for some of these reasons, though with a very distinctive voice of its own. The quirky and varied characters that populate the story deepen the sense of reality and location and the layering in of fascinating historical and cultural information is really seamless. If you love Hillerman, McGarrity or any of the other great Southwestern mystery writers, you will love this book's flavor and unique take on life (and death!) in New Mexico. A lot of fun to read too! I'm giving it four stars because it's a debut novel, so I have to leave some room for improvement...and I can't wait until this author blows me out of the water with her second book in the series!!!

P.S. Don't forget to VOTE!!!!
P.P.S. For Obama!!!

Bad editing. Author shows promise but weak plot and amateurish writing. I got to 92% and couldn't finish. Slogging through the whole book. Sorry.