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| Page 21 | Book Reviews - Fiction |
August 2006 |
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| Page 21 | Book Reviews - Fiction |
August 2006 |
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Tabula Rasa, The Skirt Man,
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By Alidė Kohlhaas Mystery novels are particularly good to read on a rainy day, and rain we have certainly had enough in early summer. But don't just read mysteries on gloomy days. You may find that Shelly Reuben, who in real life is a licensed private detective, can be quite entertaining when she spins a yarn. She is also a certified fire investigator, who uses her knowledge to create some intriguing stories. While her prose isn't always to my liking and her characters tend to be two-dimensional, I find that her professional insight into arson gives these books real authenticity. I say this from experience because part of my life as a reporter also meant writing about many fires, some of them rather horrendous. There is an odor one will never forget and that is the smell of a burned-out house after a blaze has been doused by water. It lingers in the mind long after it has been washed out of one's hair, cleaned out of one's clothing, and cleared out of one's nostrils. Tabula Rasa and The Skirt Man offer two very different situations, with apparent arson being the common ground that arouses the interest of two investigators, fire marshal Billy Nightingale and his brother-in-law, state trooper Sebastian Bly. Nightingale actually works out of New York City, but he comes to visit the Blys in upstate New York and invariably gets drawn into an arson case there. The two are often assisted by Nightingale's sister, who is Bly's wife. In Tabula Rasa we learn all about the family history of the Nightingales and how Billy became an investigator. The siblings grew up in the Mid-West, but eventually ended up in New York City. But, the fires that these three investigate always happen in small-town upstate New York.
Reuben manages to capture the atmosphere of the rural communities, but she fails to convince the reader about big-town artistic life. That part of the story is sort of woven into both books because the Bly daughter is a budding ballerina, who is supposedly given headline praise for her dancing by New York's dance critics. Mhm! That has the ring of naivete about it, written by someone who hasn't had much contact with the world of dance and criticism. That is just one minor aspect of several that I found distracting from otherwise quite engaging mystery tales with some amazing twists and turns. In Tabula Rasa (which roughly translates from Latin into 'a clean slate') two children die in an apparently accidental house fire. In The Skirt Man, the subject of the title is an eccentric who also dies in a fire that seems to have no real cause. How the investigators go about to solve the mysteries of these fires is well described, but the incidentals around the stories are like the ballerina tale, without real substance. Perhaps Reuben has failed to do her research thoroughly enough to breathe life into the periphery of their tales. For me, however, to be completely fascinated, stories have to be convincing in all aspects, not just in the alleged arsons and the investigations that are carried out by these three 'detectives'. These books, then, are good 'light' reading despite the 'dark' subject of arson, but the reader should not expect to be dazzled by Reuben's prose, or by her characterization of individual actors in her stories. |
