> WHODUNIT
More than any other crime writer, Cynthia Riggs’s life and work is all of a piece.
Riggs, now 84, is in the 13th generation of her family to live on Martha’s Vineyard. Her father founded a journal that published authoritative articles on the Vineyard’s history. Riggs herself once worked as a rigger at the Vineyard’s shipyard and lived on a 13.5metre houseboat for12 years while she ran the Chesapeake Bay Ferry Boat Company.
In her late 60s, she got an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College and began writing crime novels. Her books, now numbering a dozen, feature Victoria Trumbull, a lively nonagenarian native of Martha’s Vineyard. Speaking of her fellow island residents, Victoria says, “I’m related to half of them. I know where they live. I know where the bodies are buried.”
The latest Riggs book, Bloodroot, offers a typical demonstration of Victoria in sleuthing mode, putting her superior knowledge of local people and customs at work in solving a double murder. The two victims are a patient and an employee at the island’s busiest dental clinic. A dozen or more suspects emerge from Victoria’s calm but stubborn interrogations and, while the book is far more cosy than thriller, a satisfying degree of suspense keeps the narrative at a pleasant boil from beginning to end. Usually stories set in posh English boarding schools, populated by ambitious students pointed to Oxford, are all about boys. This first novel, however, is all about girls — and all treacherous. The central character, Josephine, Greenwood Hall’s Head Girl, and her best friend, Freya, are on the correct and ambitious track until mysterious events on one horrendous night — the exact nature of the events remain secret until the book’s climax — blow up their relationship and their futures. All delivered in a fashion that remains clever, devilish and readable throughout.
It’s the autumn of 1964. Marjorie Trumaine and her husband, Hank, live on a farm in a desolate North Dakota plane. A hunting accident has left Hank blind and paralyzed from the neck down. The couple scrapes by, just barely, on Marjorie’s income as an indexer for a New York City publisher. Can life get any bleaker than this?
Apparently so: Marjorie’s dear friend, the beloved librarian in a nearby town, seems to have put a gun to her head and shot herself to death. Marjorie figures it’s murder disguised as suicide and she sets out to prove it. Sweazy works wonders to keep readers turning the pages through such raw and stark material and most readers will leave the book feeling somewhat elated, though vowing never to set foot in North Dakota.
Frank Marr, the central character and narrator of David Swinson’s new novel, is a former Washington, D.C. cop-turned-privateeye who hunts down bad guys. He also snorts cocaine, drinks Jameson whiskey, swallows OxyContin. He breaks laws, violates constitutional amendments, invents elaborate fabrications to cover up his transgressions. And yet he emerges as the guy who rescues teenage girls kidnapped by Hispanic gang bangers.
The book’s action is forever on the boil. But the appeal of The Second Girl depends on the reader’s reaction to the morally questionable Frank Marr. He’s the kind of law enforcer Donald Trump would drool over. Do the rest of us want to spend time with such a questionable character? Sometimes, in fiction anyway, that’s just the way the world of crime shakes down.