8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Jane Haddam's Second Tier Tops Most Authors' First, July 26, 2010
This review is from: Wanting Sheila Dead (Hardcover)
Wanting Sheila Dead is Jane Haddam's (Orania Papazoglou's) latest Gregor Demarkian mystery with a murder and a bonus crime.
One-line review: Not Haddam's best, but very good nonetheless, and recommended to any lover of well-crafted fair-play mysteries.
The Gregor Demarkian stories combine detection with the long-running love affair between Gregor and Bennis Day Hannaford. Haddam falls short of the job that Dorothy Sayers did with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, but that is no disgrace. That you can credibly mention the two authors in one breath speaks well of Haddam.
In the previous Gregor Demarkian story, Living Witness, Gregor and Bennis finally made their love affair official, married by the mayor in front of the local church on Cavenaugh Street. Bennis and Cavanaugh Street came into Gregor's life in the first of the series, Not A Creature Was Stirring. Now, as Gregor and Bennis are adjusting to a true marriage, this story returns to the roots of their relationship. The murder occurs in Engine House, the Hannaford family home, which Bennis will not visit and will not let go of. A second mystery occurs on Cavenaugh Street, where Gregor and Bennis live among the families with whom Gregor grew up.
The murder explores themes of celebrity (previously explored in Cheating at Solitaire) and of personal conduct, as well as the anonymity of modern society. The Cavenaugh Street mystery explores how civic order and community protect the community's members. And unlike her story Conspiracy Theory, there is no attempt to link the two crimes in the plot. The link is thematic.
Haddam uses Gregor as loudspeaker for her own views. Here she has him discuss how Agatha Christie uses the solving of a crime to reflect the restoration of civic order. This mirrors G. K. Chesterton's view that the solution of a detective story restores the moral order which has been disturbed by the crime. And while Haddam has described herself (on her website) as a liberal, one might almost discern a few conservative stripes in her approach to this issue.
None of this detracts from the story; it strengthens it if it does anything at all.
To understand this story's weaknesses, we must look at the strengths of Jane Haddam's best stories.
First, her best mysteries involve a sort of a keystone, a missing fact at which she (and Gregor) hint, often repeatedly. When this single fact drops into place, the logic of the solution explodes into clarity, like a note or riff in a great piece of music, one that you would never have expected, but once having heard it, can imagine no other. The stellar examples are Precious Blood and A Stillness in Bethlehem, but other stories (including True Believers) also have this. In Wanting Sheila Dead, such a fact exists for the secondary mystery, but it is found by chance, rather than by any logic that allows Gregor to assert that it must exist or what it might be. For the primary mystery, the key fact is given, and so it must not be trumpeted if the mystery is to be preserved. (John Dickson Carr discusses this sort of clue in his essay The Grandest Game in the World. I think he would approve of Haddam.)
Second, in Haddam's best stories the characters are presented one or two at a time, each in a setting that allows them to be presented memorably. Often they are contemplating themselves, their appearance, or their situation. Because many of the characters in Wanting Sheila Dead are introduced in a crowd, without flashbacks or side turnings, they cannot be so treated. They simply don't have time to reflect or act freely; they react to each other before any are well established, and those reactions simply can't make that many people memorable, at least not in this reader's mind.
This notwithstanding, Wanting Sheila Dead is a good addition to Jane Haddam's work and a good, solid read in the great tradition of the fair-play mystery.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but not her best, August 18, 2010
This review is from: Wanting Sheila Dead (Hardcover)
I would agree with a number of the reviews listed here; this was a good read, but not the author's best.
For me, one of the problems (other have mentioned this in their reviews) is that many of the characters are introduced to the reader as a group and - try as I might - none had enough of an individuality to allow me to keep them straight. Having said that, I think it is also true that many actual reality show contestants (which, in the book, are the people involved in one of the mysteries) merge into each other, so much so that it is hard to keep them apart in one's mind.
I enjoyed the continuing story of Gregor and Bennis (and 'the house'), but felt that, while this wasn't a home run, it was a good run nonetheless, and I look forward to the next Demarkian mystery.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haddam writes another winner, August 15, 2010
This review is from: Wanting Sheila Dead (Hardcover)
I don't read mysteries to figure out who did them before the end, I read them to meet intelligent problem-solving people and to encounter a slice of life that broadens my understanding and challenges me. That's a good thing, because I ceertainly wouldn't have known who the guilty suspects were in this one. Gregor Demarkian does, though:he's insight comes from his Agatha Christie-like understanding of the evils that men (and women) do, and his ability to focus on 'what happened', not 'what you mistakenly THINK happened in your desire to explain things.' All of the twists and turns of the plot, and the humorous and loving insight into the Armenian American community, are depicted in Haddam's graceful prose, always a pleasure to wrap around my mind.
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