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An interesting premise. Charlotte La Rue, who owns a cleaning service catering to the wealthy in New Orleans Garden District, becomes involved in investigating the murder of the husband of one of her best clients, a man both ruthless and cruel, and whose father had been murdered in the same fashion fifteen years earlier. There are two interesting pairs of relationships: Jeanne Dubuisson, Charlotte's client, and her mother, Miss Clarice; and Charlotte and her son, Hank. Miss Clarice, who pretends to be more an invalid than she really is is an abusive nag. Bedridden -- or so she pretends -- she insists on being waited on hand and foot by her daughter. In one of the more bizarre scenes in the book, Charlotte observes Miss Clarice, who is well past eighty, weight training in her bedroom. Presumably, this is to suggest that she would be strong enough to commit the murder, but the scene is very awkward. Charlotte's son, Hank, is a one note character. Every conversation is about his trying to talk Charlotte, who is 59, into retiring. She suspects that, as a physician, he is embarrassed to have a maid for a mother. Musing on her ethical code, Charlotte says that living by the Golden Rule "was not synonymous with being a doormat for anyone and everyone to walk on." But that's precisely what she is. Every time Jeanne arks her to do something beyond the call of duty (always prefacing her requests by "I hate to impose"), Charlotte agrees to any and all requests, no matter how inconvenient or onerous they may be. Miss Clarice reveals to Charlotte that Anna-Maria, Jeanne's daughter is actually the child of Brian, the gardener, with whom Jeanne had planned to elope, a plot foiled by her dreadful father who framed Brian by accusing him of theft and arranged with his golfing buddy judge to send Brian to prison. Meanwhile, her father arranged for Jeanne to marry the odious Jackson Dubuisson, threatening to cut her off without a penny if she didn't. He bribed Jackson with the promise of a partnership in his law firm if he married Jeanne and treated Anna-Maria as his own. Alas, the novel doesn't live up to its promise. In the middle of the book, after Charlotte and her niece Judith, a police officer, order oyster po'boys, the atmosphere of New Orleans, one of America's most historic and elegant cities, pretty much disappears. The major problem with the novel is that too many promising subplots are begun and then just dropped. At the beginning we have a conversation with Nadia, one of Charlotte's employees, who lives with and has a son with an abuser. When the abuser is jailed for theft of graveyard artifacts, Nadia begs Charlotte to help. Charlotte enlists her nephew, an attorney, but we never learn how things turn out and whether Nadia summons up the courage to take her son and leave. Further, Colley introduces an engaging character, Carol Jones, as a love interest for Hank, but that too goes nowhere. Charlotte's feckless sister Madeline, a CPA, turns up, having been fired once again, but soon her boss calls and hires her back. The point being? Madeline tells Charlotte that she's been rehired because she knows things that the IRS would love to be privy to -- but, again, this thread goes nowhere. Maid for Murder is light and pleasant, but there are just too many loose ends.
Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, September 2002
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