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One of the ways a mystery stands out to me, especially among the plethora of amateur detective stories out there, is that the story is about more than just the whodunit. Carol Cail's earlier Maxey Burnett mystery, If Two of Them are Dead , got my attention not only by being an interesting mystery (the lead character actually tries to find out the truth about her mother's murder some years back) but it also offered one of the more interesting secondary characters I'd encountered in quite a while. And secondary characters can make an otherwise pedestrian book worth reading. Luckily, Cail is not a pedestrian writer and Who Was Sylvia? is a worthwhile sequel. Sylvia was, essentially, a downtown Boulder character who has died and Maxey becomes interested in her death, in part because Maxey had to release Sylviaís body to the mortuary. Sylvia was somewhat of a packrat, collecting pieces of paper and trivia, and Maxey's business card was found on her body. As the co-owner of an alternative newspaper, The Blatant Regard (I do like that name), Maxey has the curiosity and some of the resources to look into the death of this woman, known to the Pearl Street merchants as "Packy". Unknowingly, while scrounging, Sylvia found evidence of a crime and hid it away in one of the boxes she kept filled with her findings. There isn't enough of Scotty, the older, quotation-spouting secondary character, in this book. We get to meet Calen, a charming fire marshall Maxey's hooked up with, and again, Cail's abilities with secondary character shows clearly. The author sometimes switches gears. She goes from the standard narration by an omniscient third party who just reports on events to telling you what some folks are thinking, which is a little jarring to me. But Maxey is fun, a bit innocent and young, but lively and caring and the reader gets involved quickly. There are some problems of identification (who's really dead, Betsy? B.J.?), eccentric and/or disappearing people, arson fires and intense poets and worn-out business people, as well as the fun and oddity of Boulder during Halloween. When Scotty goes to pick up lunch one afternoon at a deli, he waited in line behind a six-foot duck. "It was probably a Halloween costume, but on the Pearl Street Mall, one never knew." In another memorable scene, Maxey is spooked when someone apparently puts her wet laundry in the dryer, when she is alone in Calen's house. Weird, very weird. Like any novel with an amateur sleuth, there's always the question of "how does she earn a living while she's out snooping around? But Scotty's in the office, she runs a weekly newspaper, and Maxey knows the community well, so the reader can accept that she's using reporter's instincts and some nosiness; she can always write a story about what she learns, after all. The book is a bit short at 178 pages; I could have spent more time with Maxey and Scotty, a character I'd love to invite home for dinner, and Calen, the cool boyfriend. But I would far rather read a short mystery than one where it's clear that the author or editor decided it needed filler. We've all read those and they're deadly. Who Was Sylvia? made me want to reread Carol Cail's earlier books, and that is one of the more sincere compliments I can offer to a writer. -- http://www.drizzle.com/~roscoe/tshirts.html - Sherloc kian, Wodehousian & more
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, February 2000
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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