Sun 11 Jun 2017
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: NANCY PICKARD – Confession.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[7] Comments
NANCY PICKARD – Confession. Jenny Cain #9. Pocket, hardcover,1994; paperback, 1995.
I’ve been a Jenny Cain fan ever since Pickard started writing about her, though I thought her last — But I Wouldn’t Want to Die There — was a distinctly minor effort.
Things are going swimmingly in Port Frederick, Massachusetts for Jenny and her policeman husband Geoff, until. Until one morning when an acned, sullen teenager shows up on their doorstep and tells Geoff that’s he’s his biological son, but all he wants to do with him is for him to find out who killed his mother and father.
The cops said the man killed the woman and then himself, but the kid doesn’t buy it. Geoff feels guilty but a little elated — he’s been wanting children — and Jenny just feels upset. She hasn’t. The boy’s non-real father was a member of a family with a weird religion (Jesus as homebuilder) and his mother was the town punch as a girl. Interesting times for Jenny & Geoff.
Pickard’s strengths are evident here. They are a very engaging and readable prose style, and a set of characters that you can like (or dislike, as the case may be) and believe in. All too often in the current plethora of “personal” mysteries the feelings and thoughts of the protagonist distract from the story, but I don’t find that to be the case with the Cain series. Pickard is an effective and enjoyable writer.
The story falls apart a bit at the end, though, when Jenny goes to see a person, a sort of unsavory deus ex machina, who enlightens her on past matters that explain all. It’s all wrapped up neatly, but both the person and circumstances are unlikely to the point of idiocy. It diminished my pleasure in the book considerably, but not enough to be sorry I read it.
The Jenny Cain series —
Generous Death (1984)
Say No to Murder (1985)
No Body (1986)
Marriage is Murder (1987)
Dead Crazy (1988)
Bum Steer (1990)
I.O.U. (1991)
But I Wouldn’t Want to Die There (1993)
Confession (1994)
Twilight (1995)
By career, Jenny Cain is the director of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation, and as such is “is privy to the charitable intentions of the town’s wealthiest citizens.”
June 11th, 2017 at 12:28 pm
Of considerable note, I’m sure, is the fact that Nancy Pickard has won the following awards for her writing, both novels and short stories: Agatha, Anthony, Shamus, Macavity, and was a finalist four times for an Edgar.
For full details:
http://www.nancypickard.com/awards.html
June 12th, 2017 at 4:57 pm
Attractive series and well written, but things like that deus ex machina happen too often for me.
June 12th, 2017 at 8:45 pm
It’s my impression, and someone can tell me if I’m wrong, that the series started out as cozies but as time went on they started to have a lot more grit to them.
June 13th, 2017 at 3:16 pm
I believe we are missing an important sub-genre of mysteries that should fit between cozies/ romantic suspense and hard boiled. Where do writers such as Gregory Macdonald and much of Thomas Perry fit?
So many writers focus on plot without dark violence or characters with a strong mystery. When one starts to assign mystery writers to cozies or hard-boiled countless writers fall in-between.
I prefer using traditional mystery versus hard-boiled, but even then so many mysteries don’t fit either.
So what should we call the not-cozies, not-hardboiled mystery?
June 13th, 2017 at 4:56 pm
Off the top of my head, I’d rather call the not-cozies and not-hard-boiled “traditional” mysteries,” for lack of a better term right now, somewhere in the middle between the two extremes. To my way of thinking, there’s a spectrum of all kinds of detective fiction slotted between cozy and hard-boiled, with both books and authors fitting in wherever a consensus of readers puts them, on a scale 0 to 10, 0 = pure cozy, and 10 = pure hard-boiled.
I’m talking about detective fiction, I realize, not crime fiction in general. That’s a whole other kettle of fish. I’ll have to think about that.
June 14th, 2017 at 8:48 am
I use traditional for the style of pre-pulp mystery where the puzzle and clues were the focus such as Doyle and Christie and the hard-boiled for the Hammett and Chandler group.
Here is another fun question what authors would assume the top identifying role of the middle group?
June 14th, 2017 at 10:24 am
You’re ahead of me on this. I’m still working out the details of my own scale. At one end I’d put the correct lot of fluffy cozies — and by the way, I see that Barnes & Noble has recently created a special section for them, several vertical bookcases worth, separate from the rest of their mysteries — and the hardboiled books at the others. The traditional mysteries, such as the Christie’s and Doyle’s. I’d put in the middle. The center core of detective fiction, if you will.
This is as far as I’ve gotten. I’m still flying by the seat of my pants, you see.