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One of the great things about the Sal Kilkenny series is that the reader can really relate to the lead character. In spite of the fact that Sal is a private investigator, her life is extraordinarily normal and routine. As the book opens, she is experiencing total exhaustion as the Christmas holiday approaches. She is not planning to accept any more new cases for the time being. Her resolve disappears, however, when she is approached by a family that is suffering terribly. The Johnstone family matriarch, Miriam, has allegedly committed suicide. Although admittedly a person whose mental health has been fragile in the past, Miriam had seemed to put her troubles behind her and to be forging a productive life. Her family feels that the police accepted the situation too readily and want Sal to investigate Miriam's last hours for their own peace of mind. Their feeling is that Miriam would never have killed herself in the way that the police say she did, by jumping from the upper level of a parking garage. Miriam was almost pathologically afraid of heights. At first Sal is inclined to believe that the police came to the correct conclusion. As she looks further into the situation, though, she begins to have her doubts. That restful holiday that Sal had planned for herself is further destroyed by another case that she takes on. A distraught woman calls who is gravely concerned about the behavior of her college-aged son. Up until this point in time, Adam Reeve has been a model son. Suddenly, his grades have been going down and he is disappearing for long periods of time. It's Sal's job to follow him and see if she can determine the reason for the turn-around in his behavior. Staincliffe does an excellent job of realistically portraying the rather mundane job of an ordinary private investigator doing generally ordinary work, all the while balancing the needs of her occupation with caring for a young daughter and her housemate's son. Although I found the identification of a key perpetrator in the Johnstone case to be overly facile, I felt that the various threads in both investigations were believable, although the resolution of the Johnstone situation was less than plausible. The approach overall was straightforward and true to life. The problem that I had with the book was around Staincliffe's technical writing abilities. In spite of the fact that I was engaged in the plot and really liked the characters, I almost gave up on reading the book purely because it was so poorly written. The sentence construction was atrocious; the book was rife with grammatical errors and poorly punctuated passages. There were incomplete sentences that didn't flow and sentences that ran on, all of which made portions of the reading very confusing. Staincliffe also had a tendency to write some very short chapters (less than 2 pages). The end result was that the narrative felt fractured to me, as this tended to break up the flow of the book. There were 49 chapters in the 250-page book which seemed excessive to me. Putting that aside, I will likely read more of Staincliffe's work. Her forte is characterization. In addition to the lead characters, I thought she did very well in the portrayal of the children. I left the book wanting to know more about whre the characters were going, which is a good sign. I just hope that the author will find a top-notch editor to resolve the technical writing issues. Note: This review is based on the UK hardcover edition, published 4 February 2002, from Allison & Busby Ltd, 2002. The UK paperback will be available in May 2003
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, December 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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