Shakespeare's Christmas (Conclusion)

Shakespeare’s Christmas (Conclusion) 

I guess I’m getting better in this Mystery Reader role, guessing the outcome of a whodunit, or at least how it will play out at the end.  True, my personal prime suspect was not the real killer, but I had suspected that was the case anyway; that the seemingly most incriminating incident was a decoy, albeit a subtle one, designed to distract us from the real killer.  The resolution, or what might be called the Exposition (the explanation near the end of a mystery of how the clues and other details all fit together at last) was interestingly facilitated by letting us listen in on Jack calling his colleague to tell him how it all came down. 

But yes, the babysitting stint was the scene of the culmination of the action in which the crime was actually solved, at least for the reader.  Lily’s lack of experience in babysitting and the subsequent mishaps that occurred before things got serious were amusing, beginning before the parents of the family whose house it was even left.  She burped the baby without putting anything on her shoulder, with predictable results.  Even I know that you’re just asking for a wet mess down your back if you do this!  This is followed by the older girls getting into the make-up, spilled milk going into Anna’s lap, and the boy toddler being stopped just short of applying sharp fingernail trimmers to the baby’s toenails.  Yikes. 

But when Eve’s father shows up unexpectedly to pick up Eve and the baby, Jane, Eve’s reaction is what tips Lily off to what is really going on.  “’Maybe … you could tell him me and Jane need to spend the night here, like we were supposed to?  So he won’t take us home?’  She’s intended to tell me something else.  I wondered how much time I had before Emory came to find out what was keeping us.  ‘Why don’t you want to go home?’ I asked, as if we had all the time in the world.  ‘Maybe if he really wanted me to come, Jane could stay here with you?’ Eve asked, and suddenly tears were trembling in her eyes.  ‘She’s so little.’  ‘He won’t get her.’  Eve looked almost giddy with relief.  ‘You don’t want to go,’ I said.  ‘Please, no,’ she whispered.  ‘Then he won’t get you.’  Thus the stage is set for a very intense confrontation, a fitting climax to a beautifully paced, slow-build of a story. 

On the surface, this is rather a modestly wrought work, minus the chase scenes, the explosions, the numerous fist-fights and brilliantly deduced conclusions made from momentary flashes of brilliance.  No, the author gives her readers much more credit than that, relying on them to fill in a lot of the blanks and to be able to appreciate a much more subtle treatment.  And like Ms. Harris’ other works, the story rides on the strength of the characters themselves, reminding us that it doesn’t matter how clever the plot is if we don’t connect on a deep level with the characters.  The front cover of my copy of the book features a quote from “Booklist”: “Lily Bard is one of the best-drawn and most compelling characters.”  An understatement, in my opinion (which is very strange indeed for a cover blurb!). 

Jack, as a character, is adequately fleshed out (the movie version, if and when, will probably “flesh him out” to the extreme…) but only just.  He does show some complexity on the occasions when he is forced to admit that Lily is right when he is not.  He just manages not to eat crow when, in the aftermath, Lily innocently asks, “’What were you doing last night?’  ‘While you were confronting the real kidnapper?’ Jack looked at me darkly.  ‘Well, sweetheart, I was rear-ending your soon-to-be brother-in-law.’”  In order to get a peek into Dill’s car trunk to see whether there was any incriminating evidence, he was planning to run his car into the back of Dill’s car.  Probably not by-the-book detective technique.  But when you’re running out of ideas while your girlfriend solves your case for you … whatcha gonna do?





January’s book of the month; “The Fault in Our Stars,” by John Green.
(Segment chapters: 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, Conclusion)

 TIME Magazine’s #1 Fiction Book of 2012!

“The Fault in Our Stars is a love story, one of the most genuine and moving ones in recent American fiction, but it’s also an existential tragedy of tremendous intelligence and courage and sadness.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine

Shakespeare's Christmas (Chapters 5-6)

Shakespeare’s Christmas (Chapters 5-6) 

Lily continues to sink her teeth deeper and deeper into the puzzle of the murders and the case that her boyfriend, Jack, is working on.  There still isn’t enough evidence collected on either case to tie them together, but the two seem to have a working assumption that there is a connection.  The newest murder, Meredith Osborn’s, threatens to tear the town apart to the point of cancelling the wedding, and Lily is half convinced that Dill, the groom-to-be, is the murderer anyway.  Meredith’s husband shows every sign of being devastated by her murder, making it seem a stretch to suspect him.  Dill is another story. 

The only way that Lily can see for her to make headway into the case – an option not open to Jack – is to offer to clean the Osborn house and Dill’s house.  In the Osborn house she does find the yearbook with the page missing that is was sent to Jack and is his most valuable tangible clue, but she also finds another intact copy of the same book.  She also manages to steal one of Meredith’s old hairbrushes in order to secretly obtain her fingerprints to see if there is a match with the ones on the yearbook page. 

Her meeting with the police chief, Chandler Brainerd – an old school buddy that she had had a short-lived relationship with – doesn’t produce much, but serves to clear the air with him and put most of the cards on the table.  Their meeting ended amicably enough but “I knew that if Chandler thought I was concealing something that would contribute to solving the murders that had taken place in the town he was sworn to protect, he would come down on me like a ton of bricks.”  Her encounters with another old school friend, Mary Maude Plummer, were a little more productive.  It’s hard to put a finger on any specific clues, but one gets the feeling that when the case does get resolved, Lily will remember something from one or both of these encounters that was said that will help everything fall into place. 

Her cleaning of Dill’s residence – the one he and her sister are planning to share after the wedding – was interrupted by her turning to suddenly find him there; a tense moment that he either doesn’t notice or pretends not to.  He makes the mistake of trying to play on her emotions:  “’Lily, I know you and I have never gotten close.  But I don’t have a sister, and I hope you’ll be one to me.’  I was repelled.  Emotional appeals were not the way to make a relationship happen.  ‘You don’t know how hard it’s always been for Varena.’  I raised my eyebrows.  ‘Excuse me?’  ‘Being your sister.’”  Wow.  This is Dill trying to “connect.”  He tries to explain that Varena feels that she’s always lived in Lily’s shadow, but the damage has already been done.  His ineptness here would seem to preclude any guilt on his part in the murders, but then she blindsides him with a reference to his previous wife … “’Did your wife ever threaten to hurt Anna?’  He turned white as a sheet. I’d never seen anyone pale so fast.  ‘What – how – ‘he was spluttering.  ‘Before she killed herself, did she threaten to hurt Anna?’  ‘What have you heard?’ he choked out.”  This seems practically an admission that he has something to hide.

 

Before we get to the last chapter, we see the climax being set up.  Because of a flu outbreak, there is suddenly a shortage of babysitters.  Lily sees her opportunity to get into the thick of things (and out of yet another socially awkward pre-wedding situation!) by volunteering to be the babysitter of a whole roomful of rugrats, thoroughly shocking everyone who knows of her aversion to dealing with children.  Yes, a truly tense resolution to this mystery in the making!




Next week:  Conclusion




January’s book of the month; “The Fault in Our Stars,” by John Green. 
(Segment chapters: 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, Conclusion)

 TIME Magazine’s #1 Fiction Book of 2012!

“The Fault in Our Stars is a love story, one of the most genuine and moving ones in recent American fiction, but it’s also an existential tragedy of tremendous intelligence and courage and sadness.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine

Shakespeare's Christmas (Chapters 3-4)

Some of the observations about the Christmas Holiday Season really hit home.  Regarding public Christmas displays - “Unlike Shakespeare, Bartley was holding onto its manger scene, though I had never found plastic figures in a wooden shed exactly spiritual.  Carols blared endlessly from the speakers around the square, and all the merchants had lined their store windows with twinkling colored lights and artificial snow.  If there was a true religious emotion to be felt about Christmas, I had been too numbed by all this claptrap to feel it for the last three years.”  Aren’t most of us more than a little jaded by said “claptrap”?  It’s the people who continually get sucked into The Wonder Of Christmas year after year that I’m a little concerned about!

The arrival of Lily’s detective boyfriend, Jack, in Bartley is less of a surprise to us than it is to her.  Is it too much of a coincidence that a case he’s working on brings him to this small town at exactly the same time she is there for the wedding?  We’re not as amazed when these things happen in real life as we are skeptical when they happen in fiction.  And is it just a further coincidence that murders are suddenly taking place; murders that are unrelated to Jack’s investigation, as far as he or anyone else can tell?  And if that isn’t coincidental enough, Lily happens to be the one to stop the homeless purse snatcher, who seems to be in possession of what might be the weapon used in the murders. 

“I shook my head as I stared out the living room window.  I was not a law enforcement officer or any kind of detective, but several things about the homeless-man-as-murderer scenario just didn’t make sense.”  She may not be a detective, but she analyzes the data she does have with razor-sharp logic.  “If this man was clever enough to hide Diane Dykeman’s purse, which he almost certainly had stolen, why hadn’t he been clever enough to get rid of the evidence of a much more serious crime?”  The fact that the doctor was still sitting at his desk when murdered tells her that the murderer was someone he knew and trusted – otherwise, he would have gotten out of his chair to deal with the stranger, who couldn’t have snuck up on him.  Lily may not be a detective (or a murder mystery writer!) but she sure thinks like one. 

In Jack’s hotel room that night, along with some very steamy bedroom action (Harris leaves just enough to the imagination, thank you very much) Lily gets the full explanation of the case he’s working on.  Is this realistic?  Does a private investigator share everything he knows about a case with his girlfriend?  If he does, should we suspect his professionalism?  Yes, the case revolves around Lily’s sister, so the outcome of the investigation is very much in her interest.  But doesn’t that make it even less excusable to divulge sensitive information to her about the case?  He understandably trusts Lily with the information, but if it should come to light later that she knew all the details, that could reflect very badly on his professionalism to most observers.

 

Chapter 4 ends with the discovery of yet another murder.  With the homeless purse snatcher presumably behind bars, our prime suspect can be crossed off.  We saw that coming, of course, with the suspected murder weapon having been clumsily planted near his “nest” of cardboard boxes, but the characters had to consider him the most likely suspect until now.  If anyone has guessed who the murderer(s) is/are, out of the possibilities presented so far, they’re a much more seasoned Mystery Reader than I am.  That’s not saying much; I’m content to just let the plot unfold and see how the mystery gets solved.  That’s Jack’s job – and Lily’s, too, I guess!





Next week:  Chapters 5-6

Shakespeare's Christmas (Chapters 1-2)

Charlaine Harris never lets me down.  She has a huge and loyal fan base because of this, and I’m definitely one of them!  In the first three pages of this story, I was already chuckling at her acerbic wit and admiring her technique.  Lily Bard, the reluctant protagonist of this series, is a distinct personality, and a stark contrast to Sookie Stackhouse of the outrageously popular “Trueblood” series.  Lily comes with a lot of emotional (as well as physical) scars from her past and just wants to be left alone.  “In what I thought of as my previous life, the life I’d led in Memphis … I had believed that all women were sisters under the skin, and that underneath all the crap, men were basically decent and honest.” 

A LOT happens in the first chapter, enough to fill 4 or 5 chapters in a similar book.  This economy of writing space is refreshing and appreciated.  It’s a relatively short book, just over 200 pages with only 7 chapters, but it doesn’t feel “skimpy” at all.  And, although the early action centers around an event as commonplace as the preparations for a wedding, the perspective of our heroine keeps the narrative interesting, focusing as it does on her discomfort with people in general, and this crowd in particular. 

The occurrence which makes this a mystery is completely absent – not even hinted at – until the book is one quarter underway: this might have been frustrating to someone who was dying to sink their teeth into a whodunit right away, but I hadn’t even missed it.  The storyline minus the murder mystery element, plus the engaging writing style had me satisfied for the moment.  But the discovery of the bodies is especially jarring in light of the relative mundaneness of the preceding events. 

Lily’s hometown, Bartley, where all this is taking place, is about as “small town” as small towns get.  It’s described as being in “The Delta,” - apparently there is a large section of Arkansas a few hours east of Little Rock that is as flat as Kansas is supposed to be, and the Texas Panhandle really is.  This is where Lily grew up and it hasn’t changed much; even the names of her old acquaintances and relatives - most of the townsfolk - have a “backwoods” ring to them.  The latest crime news in town is that there is a purse snatcher on the loose.  “A purse snatching did not seem as remarkable as it would have a few years ago.  Now, with gang presence and drugs in every tiny town up and down the interstate and all in between, what happened to Diana Dykeman, a sales clerk at one of the local clothing stores, didn’t seem so bad.  She seemed lucky to be unhurt, rather than unfortunate to have her purse snatched at all.”

 

When Lily and her sister, Varena (country enough fer ya?), discover the dead and dying victims at the doctor’s office, it takes a moment for Varena’s nurse experience to kick in.  It also seems to take Lily a few minutes to realize that the danger may not be entirely gone.  But she hustles her sister out of the building as soon as it dawns on her.  In an odd twist, the policeman who responds to Varena’s phone call turns out to be a black man.  Yes, this story is set in “modern” times, and yes, the law enforcement profession is one in which blacks are well represented.  But in small-town eastern Arkansas – not that far from Memphis – this is probably a rarity.  He seems to be nervous at first, but settles into his professional policeman persona after checking out the scene, and questions the sisters at length, a model law enforcement officer.  And thus, the plot swings wildly into a full blown murder mystery.




Next week:  Chapters 3-4