Tue 2 Jan 2024
A 1001 Midnights Review: SUSAN DUNLAP – An Equal Opportunity Death.
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by Marcia Muller
SUSAN DUNLAP – An Equal Opportunity Death. Vejay Haskell #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1984. Dell, paperback, 1994.
Veronica (“Vejay”) Haskell is something of a maverick, even for today’s new breed of woman: She has fled a picture-perfect marriage, a well-paying executive position, and all the comforts of life in San Francisco for a cold little house and an arduous job as a Pacific Gas & Electric Company meter reader in the Russian River area of northern California.
The rainy season takes its toll on Vejay, and she takes an illegal sick day; but instead of staying home, she goes to friend Frank Goulet’s bar, quarrels with him, and when Frank turns up murdered, she finds herself the prime suspect.
Vejay quickly decides that local sheriff Wescott isn’t going to look far for the killer; and she wonders about a number of things, including the call that Frank Goulet received at his bar while she was there — a call that prompted him to cancel the date they’d just made and thus provoked their quarrel.
Carefully (at first) she sets out to question friends and residents in the area: the warm and hospitable Fortmiglic clan; Paul and Patsy Fernandez, former hippies who now own a canoe-rental business; Madge Oombs, one of the local antique dealers; Skip Bolio, a realtor; and Ned Jacobs, ranger at the nearby state park. As Yejay probes deeper, she finds herself the target of hostility, not only from the law but from these former friends and neighbors.
Vejay is forthright and refreshing, and her observations on the other denizens of the area bring them fully alive in all their peculiarities. Dunlap has a fine touch for setting, and you’ll probably want to read this one curled up in front of a warm fire, since the descriptions of the biting cold and wetness of the Russian River area during flood season will chill you.
A second Vejay Haskell novel, The Bohemian Connection, was published in 1985; in this one, she investigates strange goings-on that center on the Bohemian Club’s famous summer encampment at their Russian River grove. Dunlap is also the author of two novels about Berkeley policewoman Jill Smith — As a Favor (1984) and Karma (1984 ) — which skillfully capture the flavor of that offbeat and iconoclastic university town.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
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Bibliographic Update: A third and final book in the series was The Last Annual Slugfest (1986), and adding to the total in the Jill Smith series were eight more, making ten in all. The last one, Cop Out, appeared in 1997. Susan Dunlap also wrote four adventures of female PI Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, seven books featuring stuntwoman Darcy Lott, one standalone mystery, and three collections of short stories.