Bantam Books, 2009
Hardcover, 320 pages, $22
New mystery is a departure for Graves
Sarah Graves’s latest murder mystery, A Face at the Window, is a departure, both in title style and narrative point of view, from first person to third-and it’s far and away her best offering yet.
The twelfth in her “Home Repair Is Homicide” series, this adventure could be called “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” meets “The Perils of Pauline.” Only the thing is that this gang makes up for its lack of intelligence with an overload of venom. And in Graves’s hands the “perils” become horrifyingly real.
Once again Jacobia Tiptree, Eastport’s amateur detective and house repair maven, returns to fight the bad guys. But in this book she is the central character but not the narrator. And the third person storyteller allows Graves a broader range of people to get into hair-raising situations.
For those who are reading Graves for the first time Tiptree is a former “hotshot money-manager” in Manhattan who, having packed that all in, has settled for the peace and quiet of Passamaquoddy Bay where she’s married to a harbor pilot and raising a teen-aged son from her first marriage. She’s also restoring an early 19th-cerntury “charmingly dilapidated”-or “ramshackle” depending on your point of view-house, a seemingly endless task but one that somehow leaves her time for sleuthing.
Readers of Graves’s earlier eleven books will recognize some familiar faces, including Tiptree’s father, Jacob, and the redoubtable police chief, Bob Arnold, and there are also some new ones, not all of them welcome.
The bad guys include a couple of toughs from New Jersey working for a criminal mastermind. And for obvious reasons I’m not going to say much more about the plot except that there are, of course, murders-including one from Tiptree’s past-and a kidnapping.
It should be noted that when these Garden State worthies hit Washington County, they might as well be in a foreign country. Looking out a car window one of them observes that there are no paths and no park benches. “Animals, though, he guessed. Bears, and … well, he didn’t know what else might be running around in these trees. Were there lions in Maine forests?”
A Graves hallmark has always been descriptive paragraphs about Eastport and environs in the midst of the blood and gore, and A Face at the Window is no exception.
She writes: “The sand-polished pieces of antique bottles in aqua, green and red littered some of the sandy stretches around Moose Island, along with bits of antique china and clay pipe stems.”
At the head of each chapter there’s a box containing home repair advice called “Tiptree’s Tips.” For example: “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ goes double when it comes to tools.”
Earlier on I mentioned that this murder mystery title is a departure from earlier ones. How it actually relates to the story is for me to know and you to find out.
Copies of A Face at the Window are scheduled to be in bookstores on December 30.
Bob Gustafson is a semi-retired veteran reporter who lives and works in Eastport.