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In Portland, Oregon, people of various minority backgrounds are being targeted with violence by a group of men, and the newspapers think the violence might be related to a gang of skinheads. One fine morning, Claire Montrose is out on her morning run. No longer working as a vanity plate approver for the Portland Oregon Motor Vehicles Division, she can take her time and be aware of her location. While taking a breather, she notices a glimmer inside a crumbling wall, digs into it, and fishes out a diamond ring. Secreting it in her pocket she runs back to her home which she shares with octogenarian Charlotte "Charlie" Heidenbruch. As luck would have it, Charlie recognizes the ring right away and is terribly upset. It seems that it had belonged to a friend she had made in the 1950s when she arrived in Portland after World War II. Charlie, who is Jewish, had spent the war years in a concentration camp and came to the US afterwards. The sight of the ring reminds Charlie that Elizabeth Ellsworth, her friend who had worn the band, had committed suicide just after breaking her engagement with her wealthy Korean War veteran fiancé, Allen Lisac. But they all said that Elizabeth had returned the ring, so how did it get in the crumbling wall? After 50 years, this question brings up doubts about the suicide - it also brings up Charlie's memories of her horrific life in the camps. At Claire's urging, Charlie contacts her old friends to figure out the reason for the ring's placement in the wall. Allen Lisac, the man Elizabeth had been engaged to, has grown even wealthier with the years. He has purchased a series of drawings from the Middle Ages in order to open up an art wing in his family's name. Luckily for Claire, it directly concerns her boyfriend Dante, who is a curator at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is one of the people being considered for the job of the new museum's curatorship. If he's hired he will finally be in the same state as Claire and their life together might take that next step. This is April Henry's fourth Claire Montrose mystery. It's well-written, reads quickly and although Henry is a skilled enough writer I can't really recommend BURIED DIAMONDS. The lead character in this mystery, Claire Montrose, is engaging enough, but she is not a person who considers herself a sleuth, or is knowledgeable in modern police procedures, or in crime solving techniques. The only thing she has going for her in the detecting department is that she thinks that it's up to her to solve this 50-year-old crime. Charlie as a sidekick character is an interesting choice for a second lead. She's lived through the horrors of the Nazi death camps and has survived well in her life in America after the war. But Ms Henry uses the memories of a concentration camp survivor to give background sentiment to her book and this turned me against it. She also writes about 80+-year-old Charlie as if she is just a young woman in an old body, with none of the physical problems that would make her age a reality. I imagine someone must have told Ms Henry that the story, with its memories of the Holocaust, the sad death of a young woman in the 1950s, and the beatings of minorities in the present time, might be too dark because out of nowhere there are two scenes of impossible and improbable slapstick humor that I guess is supposed to amuse but only proves that the lead character, Claire, hasn't one brain in her head. These wacky moments ruined the book for me. After these idiotic scenes I lost my interest and respect for Claire, and from there on I just read to finish the book. I was not enjoying it. The one fun idea in the novel is that each chapter starts with a vanity plate and you get to try and figure out what the saying on it is. There's a page in the back with the answers. By showing us the horrors of the Holocaust where millions died, and citing stories of Charlie's past when she remembers watching multiple women being brutally killed, and including an incident when a woman smothered her own child to save the lives of others, Ms Henry overshadows the level of sadness the readers can feel for the story of the suicide of one single women caused by the pressures of the social polite norms of suburbia in the 1950s. By the time we find out what really happened to the small circle of wealthy friends 50 years earlier, there's very little emotion left to make the readers care. The book's underlying theme of showing us the evils of what prejudice brings out in society becomes forced. BURIED DIAMONDS starts out well enough, but it deeply disappoints on a few levels, and the dissatisfaction borders on insulting to the readers. Ms. Henry can write well but her decisions for the direction of this story left a sour taste in my mouth.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, December 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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