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Ellen Hart's THE IRON GIRL, the 13th of her Jane Lawless mysteries, is a page-turner, but one with characters you'll remember after you've turned the last page. One of Minnesota's richest families, the Simoneaus, suffered three murders in one night in 1987. The murders were allegedly committed by young black law student Dexter Haynes, but there were all sorts of holes in the prosecution's case. While Haynes languishes in prison, an industry of Simoneau Murders books has sprung up. One person may know what really happened on that long-ago night: restauranteur Jane's beloved long-term girlfriend Christine Kane. Unfortunately, Christine died of cancer the night after the murders, and Jane is trying to move forward to forge a new life without her. Drawn reluctantly into the still-open mystery of the case, Jane must confront her painful memories in order to solve it. Adding to the mystery is the appearance in town of Greta, a woman whom nobody knows and who uncannily resembles Christine. Doubling is a major theme in THE IRON GIRL, exercised most dynamically in Hart's use of two alternating narratives, following Jane in the present and Christine in the past. The titular sculpture is also a double: lost and then found, its image suggests that of the face that Christine shares with Greta. Hart's ambitious aesthetic experimentation doesn't adorn the story: it is vital to its telling. The book isn't all profound experimentation: plenty of comic relief is provided in the form of Jane's dauntless and wacky partner (in amateur investigation, not love) Cordelia, and in the bizarre everyday life of two surviving Simoneau siblings. THE IRON GIRL is a wonderfully thoughtful, intellectually and psychologically difficult mystery. The one thing about it that I found disappointing was the inside back dustjacket blurb, in which Entertainment Weekly calls Hart "a top novelist in the cultishly popular gay mystery genre." I wasn't aware that mystery novels with lesbian and gay characters constitute anything as narrowly definable as a genre. Does THE IRON GIRL really have that much in common with Jenny Roberts's hardboiled mysteries or Peter Ackroyd's fantasy-infused scarefest THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DEE? Can most published mysteries be grouped into a 'straight mystery genre'? We can puzzle this one out while we wait for Hart's next Jane Lawless mystery to be published. I hope it will be soon.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, December 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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