Mon 15 May 2017
A PI Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: LINDA GRANT – A Woman’s Place.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
LINDA GRANT – A Woman’s Place. Catherine Sayler #4. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1994. Ivy, paperback, 1995.
This is Grant’s first book since 1991, and I was beginning to be afraid she’d left the field. I thought that she along with Kijewski was one of the most promising newcomers to the female private eye group.
Catherine and her partner Jesse aren’t your typical private eyes. They specialize in corporate security with a focus on computers, and here they are hired by a software firm to investigate sexual harassment in the form of pranks and computer mail. The firm has just been taken over a smaller one, and the male employees of the acquired firm seem to be having a difficult time adjusting to the larger firm’s corporate culture.
Catherine and Jesse both go undercover and begin to work on the problem from separate angles. They discover that there is indeed a large problem, and no shortage of potential suspects. Catherine herself becomes a target of harassment, and then there is a murder.
I believe this is Grant’s best book to date. It;s a book a man could have written nearly so effectively, and a powerful statement about not only sexual harassment in the workplace, but of the difficulties our legal systems have in dealing with the problems of sexual abuse in general.
I continue to regard Sayler as one of the better characaterized protagonists in the field, as are her niece Molly, her atypical PI lover Peter, and her cop ex-husband Dan. Grant is a very good prose stylist, telling her story cleanly and without flamboyance. She manages to be intense about her subject without being hysterical, and holds her heroine’s Ramba-esque antics to a minimum. Excellent writer, interesting characters, good book.
The Catherine Sayler series —
Random Access Murder (1988).
Blind Trust (1990).
Love Nor Money (1991).
A Woman’s Place (1994).
Lethal Genes (1996).
Vampire Bytes (1998).
May 15th, 2017 at 10:26 pm
Six books in a PI series is not a bad accomplishment at all. It’s too bad Grant was competing with Grafton, Muller and Paretsky when it came to female PI novels at the same time, as I think her books have fairly well disappeared from most mystery readers’ consciousness.
It doesn’t help, I imagine, that Sayler’s cases were all tied up in the world of business, at a time when email and the whole Internet thing were getting off the ground.
If I were to read one now, I have a feeling that it would be like reading ancient history, yet an era so recent there hasn’t been time to become nostalgic about it yet.
May 16th, 2017 at 6:05 am
Speaking of ancient history…my database proves I read all six of these, the first four in 1994 (probably prompted by Barry’s review), the others when they came out. Yet, I retain nothing of the books – the characters, the plots, the setting, nothing, which I suppose is a commentary either on the books or my memory. If I didn’t like them well enough to keep reading, I wouldn’t have read all six, would I? Yet, compared with other authors I read at the same time, these have gone down the sinkhole of my memory and vanished.
As for Karen Kijewski, mentioned by Barry in the review as comparable, we always disagreed. I read her first book and hated everything about it, which remains more memorable to me than Grant and Saylor.
I guess that’s a commentary on me as well.
May 16th, 2017 at 9:31 am
I didn’t go into this in my own comment, Jeff, but you’re not alone. Based on the titles, I read the first three, but beyond that, they’re as much a blank to me as they are to you.