Death and the Walking Stick

Linda Berry

Here's a quick hint for those of you who set reading goals for yourself: if you really want to crank up the page count, I have three words for you: large print books. I picked up the large-print version of this one from the library by mistake, and it's almost twice the page count of the regular paperback. Woo!

In any case, it's got the same content. Still trying to figure out quite how I feel about said content. Berry's head honcho, Trudy Roundtree, is a small-town cop in the southern United States, which is seemingly a hotbed of all sorts of strange crimes. (One detects a scent of southern-fried Murder, She Wrote.) In this episode, Althea Boatright, crotchety old woman, runs over an old man, claiming that her dog got in the way of her feet and she couldn't brake properly. Which is all well and good, and the police are trying to find a way to get her out from behind the wheel legally, when Althea herself keels over. Thanks to a coffeeklatsch full of nosy neighbors, Trudy allows herself to be convinced that Althea's death is a bit more than it seems, and the investigation is on.

Combining the cozy with the police procedural doesn't really strike me as the best possible idea, but for what it's worth, Berry makes the best of it she can by going heavy on the cozy and light on the police procedural (with most of the police-procedural style details, amusingly, given us by the police chief's mother, a woman who's never even seen, let alone read, a Lawrence Sanders novel. This is a good thing). Still, the mixture jars a bit, kind of like eating mustard ice cream; it's perfect for connoisseurs, but the rest of the world will find the idea somewhat revolting. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't try mustard ice cream. It is a beautiful thing.) Done correctly, it is pure balm. Here, however, it's not quite correct; while not completely predictable, it's predictable in its unpredictability. The red herrings are so obvious they might as well have pictures of fish tattooed on their forearms, most of the characters are just this side of stereotypical, and while Berry gives us some tantalizing peeks into the deeper lives of some of her characters, she never fleshes them out enough to turn these folks into real three-dimensional people the reader can care about.

Decent genre mystery, but not good enough to send me rushing back to the library for the next installment.