Bantam Books
274 pp, $22.00 ($30.00 Canadian)
Eastport’s Tiptree is on the case again
It’s some measure of Sarah Graves’s pace that only a few pages into Tool & Die, along with Eastport sleuth Jacobia Tiptree, we find ourselves in Lubec confronting a dead man. And we quickly learn that his death was caused by a blow to the skull with a large cast-iron skillet — not your ordinary murder weapon.
Discovering the perpetrator and the motive, however, is quite another matter. Graves keeps the reader guessing through a series of complex twists and turns right to the hair-raising conclusion. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that the crime is wrapped up in greed, fraud and embezzlement.
Readers of Graves’s seven earlier mysteries will find a familiar cast of characters with a few new ones, including Leonora, a baby girl born to Tiptree’s detective sidekick Ellie White and her husband, George. New readers will find, however, that they’re quickly at home in Downeast Maine.
Because of Jacobia’s constant repair work on her early nineteenth-century house, the novels have come to be known as the “Home Repair is Homicide” series. She is now so consumed with that part of her life that even at a crime scene she can’t help but look at the doors and mentally note, “Hinges, latch plate, wood screws, one-by-eights.” And here and there in the book are little boxes with repair tips.
Tiptree, however, can’t resist sharing some baking tips as well.
“Moxie doughnuts are made very simply by substituting boiling Moxie for some of the liquid in the doughnut recipe. Achieving a good batch of Moxie doughnuts, however, is something else again. For one thing, you first must make ninety-nine bad batches, each only a fraction less heavy and indigestible than the one before; mine resembled grease-sodden hockey pucks with holes in the middle.”
Also, lest the pursuit of the murderer become too grim, Tiptree encounters a moose that’s eating Martha Washington geraniums out of the kitchen window box. The episode also involves her black Lab, Maggie, her Doberman, Prill, and a bucket of white paint. Well, you get the idea.
Throughout, Graves paints wonderful word pictures of Eastport and its environs while developing her characters into believable human beings. Finally, we learn for the first time how Tiptree came to be named Jacobia.
But you’ll have to find that out for yourself. You won’t regret the search.
Bob Gustafson covers Eastport, Lubec and parts of the Maritimes for Working Waterfront.