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Dido Hoare, the 30-something proprietor of an antiquarian bookshop and single mom, is walking her three-year-old son, Ben, home from nursery school when he tells her that he's seen a monkey hiding nearby. Dido is tired and thinking of other things, so she dismisses the comment as a product of her son's imagination until she remembers that she has seen a homeless man with a pet monkey in the neighborhood. In fact, she recalls having offered to buy a very old book about flower painting from him. Even though she offered him a good price for it and he obviously needed the money, he refused to sell it to her. Sure enough, the monkey appears again, this time in her back garden. She takes it in, planning to hand it over to its owner, but it becomes terrified inside her home and proceeds to tear up her kitchen. In an act of self-preservation, she gives the monkey to a friend of her father's for safekeeping. The homeless man, Harry Lewis, discovers part of a dismembered body in a wheeled garbage can down the street from Dido's shop. His wailing brings Dido to the scene. When she sees the body, she notifies the authorities, who take charge of the crime scene and take Harry in for questioning. While the police try to find a placement for Harry, he disappears. A few days later, he turns up in a nearby street bruised, disoriented, and with a broken hand. In the meantime, Chris Kennedy, Dido's journalist love interest, asks her to accompany him on an interview with a prostitute named Annie Kelly for a story he's working on about human trafficking. Also at the same time, Mrs Acker, a customer of Dido's, oddly refuses to acknowledge her on the street, even though they talk regularly at the shop. As Dido gets to know Mrs Acker, she discovers that her husband, who is a police constable, is abusing the woman. Miraculously, all of these threads intersect in a satisfying ending in which Dido is forced to overcome her own fear in order to help her neighbors in need. In THREE MONKEYS, Marianne Macdonald has done a wonderful job of presenting an everywoman protagonist. She's a harried single mom, she's got a business to run and an aging father to worry about, and, as if that weren't enough, she finds herself in the middle of situations that require extraordinary action and courage. She is pulled by her sense of humanity and ethics to do the right thing in every circumstance, and she does so to the best of her ability. In other words, she is who we are when we are being our best selves. Dido Hoare has no extraordinary powers aside from her knowledge of antiquarian books. She is a bright, compassionate woman, and that is enough. By choosing a sleuth like Dido to deal with the large issues raised by this book, Macdonald has forced herself to walk a thin line between the cozy and hard-boiled subgenres of mystery. We know and care about Dido's family and friends, and they provide assistance in her investigations when they're needed. In most mysteries, a cast like this would call for a cozy plot, one concerned with the evils of humankind on a small scale. The classic cozy is usually set in a small town and involves a murder committed off-stage, usually by a member of this closed community. This transgression is usually solved by the close observations of one of the members of the community. In contrast, although her books contain the close communal context of a straight up cozy, Macdonald tackles larger social themes in an urban setting. Here she confronts the horrors of human trafficking, domestic violence and even, in a way, the problems of the homeless mentally ill. It's difficult to blend these worlds successfully, and it is a tribute to Macdonald's gifts as an author that she manages to do so. The charm of this book is in watching Dido straddle these worlds in a realistic way, thereby allowing us to believe that if we observe small details, like a monkey's harness, closely and act in ethical ways when we are needed, we too might have an impact on the intractable problems of the world. It takes strong writing to make us believe that, and Macdonald succeeds. I enjoyed THREE MONKEYS. The clean writing, compelling characters, and vivid sense of modern London make me eager to catch up on the six Dido Hoare stories I've missed.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, April 2005
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