Customer Reviews

The Woman Who Found Grace: A Cordelia Morgan Mystery

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

 

 

I'm really looking forward to number 4 in the series, as the first three build an intriguing Morgan. It is insufficient to characterize these books as mysteries or suspense or thrillers. Whatever you think you know on one page, whether about the characters or plot or even the landscape, changes on the next. Start with any book in this series and you'll be drawn to the other two. And number 4 is just begging for a box set and a series with Angelina Jolie as Morgan!

5+ stars
I cannot wait until book 4 is published. I continuously read lesbian fiction I have quite a collection. I must say Bett Reece Johnson is tops. Her books are so intriguing. They draw you into the world of Cordelia Morgan. I agree with the other review...This could be a great TV series. Bett please let us know when to expect book 4!!

Real-life crime figure Winnie Ruth Judd (who killed her two best friends in 1931) is reincarnated in fiction here as Grace Frost, the "trunk murderess" who encounters detective Cordelia Morgan in this mediocre mystery.

Author Bett Reece Johnson has retained the basic details of Judd's crime with the exception of moving it in time from the thirties to the sixties (presumably so that the character could be released into contemporary society after 41 years in a hospital). The time-transplant is not entirely successful, as the modern day world and its trappings render Frost a more banal and less mysterious figure than she would have appeared in her own time, in the same way that bringing Lizzie Borden into the 21st century would rob her persona of the very mystique which has rendered it timeless. There is something about those long-ago times and their idealism which renders the crimes and criminals they produced more shocking, more larger-than-life, than they would appear today. Would Jack the Ripper's crimes have quite the same Grimm's Fairy Tale mystique had he committed his atrocities in 2008? Would anybody's?

That notwithstanding, The Woman Who Found Grace is not entirely a failure. It has a certain degree of suspense and interest, and the prose is sometimes memorable. I did find it difficult at times to follow its chronology, for it seems to jump around in time as well as going from one character's point of view to another without clearly identifying the speaker. I finally gave up trying to keep track and finished the book in a haze of confusion about who was talking when, what was a dream and what was reality.

It seems in the end that Winnie Ruth Judd's story was rather wasted here, and that Grace Frost would have been no more and no less interesting had she been any other kind of criminal with any other kind of crime. Certainly basing her on Judd will not endear this work to real-life scholars of the trunk murderess, although it may be of peripheral interest as an oddity since it provides a somewhat unique theory on the still-unsolved details of why and how Winnie may have killed her friends that fateful night of October 16, 1931.

If your interest is peaked by this fictionalized account, I direct you to either J. Dwight Dobkins' book "Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murders" or Jana Bommersbach's "The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd" either of which is infinitely more interesting, confirming the old adage that "truth is stranger than fiction!"