Nothing cozy about this #cozymystery by #BHBW author @BathshebaMonk

 

 

 

AVAILABLE HERE!

 

 

I don't like cozy mysteries and I don't like amateur detectives, which is why I did like Bathsheba Monk's DEAD WRONG, her first Swanson Herbinko crime novel. The Swedish and the French, with their absolutely gruesome fictional mysteries, have shown us, once and for all, that murders never are cozy, and only the British still believe that gentlemen (or gentlewomen) operatives can ever get anything done, which may explain why they lost their empire to the Cambridge Spies. Ms. Monk's surprisingly good-natured (and funny) book has crimes gruesome enough to be Scandinavian, but her investigator, a neophyte divorce lawyer who doesn't see herself as a detective, wisely employs a proper ex-cop (the multi-purpose Dick) to do her sleuthing. Which is a good thing because the book's central skullduggery is slowly revealed as a complicated tangle, and so the breathless reader is genuinely grateful to have Ms. Herbinko along as a tour guide for the bumpy, surprising ride. Swanson's job is to share the reader's dumbfounded reaction to the book's felonious gumbo even as her smart mouth and wicked sense of humor function to take the edge off a series of bloody murders committed by a set of comic opera villains. The intestinal respite this amusing-yet-frightened voice provides from the drippy mayhem is a service to the reader that Henning Mankell might consider adopting as he moves forward.

As I read DEAD WRONG, I thought of Janet Evanovich and Jennifer Weiner and their sassy female PIs, but now, with the mayhem and revelations over, I think of the book as the print incarnation of Gosford Park, the wonderful country house murder film by Robert Altman and Julian Fellowes. Both pretend to be murder-filled cozies. Both have intriguingly messy plots with dozens of quirky characters. And both of them are stage-managed by an inept police officer who simply joins the agog reader for the ride through the thicket of man's inhumanity to man. The cop in Gosford Park is a bumbling Lestrade-like detective played marvelously by Stephen Fry, while the often clueless mistress of ceremonies in Ms. Monk's book is her heroine, Swanson Herbinko, who claims she got her name from a TV dinner and who sometimes seems more worried about her expansive waistline and her nicotine habit than she is about the bodies dropping around her. I enjoyed Fry's performance in the Altman movie immensely, and I was just as pleased with Ms. Monk's use of Swanson as an everywoman, who should be told--by the way--that a size i2 is undoubtedly smaller than the dresses worn by most American women. Give yourself a break, Swanson.

Bathsheba Monk is the author of 7 novels, three plays, editor at Blue Heron Book Works and the creator of the popular Swanson Herbinko Mystery series which is being written by Andrew Sloan, Joe Taleroski, and Paul Heller. She writes young adult novels under the pen name, Maddy Wells.