RHYS BOWEN – In Like Flynn

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint, December 2005. Hardcover edition: St. Martin’s Press, March 2005.

   I’ll defer to Ms. Bowen’s website for most of the data about her, including the fact that her books have been nominated for “every major mystery award – Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Barry, Macavity – and has won seven of them.” Thanks to Crime Fiction IV, however, it can be learned that her real name is Janet Quin-Harkin. Ms. Bowen started writing mysteries later than usual in life; her first one was Evans Above, part of the Evan Evans series, and was published in 1997 when the author was 56. [FOOTNOTE.]

   From her website, here’s a list of all of the books in each of her two series:

     The Constable Evans Series: [All St. Martin’s Press in hardcover; Berkley Prime Crime in paperback.]

     The Molly Murphy Series: [St. Martin’s Press in both hardcover and paperback.]

   The Constable Evans series take place in Llanfair, Wales, and are contemporary in nature. The Molly Murphy books, on the other hand, are historical mysteries, Manhattan-based, and take place just after the turn of the last century. Naturally it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: I’ve just read the fourth book, and none of the first three.

   What that means, in other words, is that there is a lot of backstory that has developed through the course of the three before this one, and there are a number of characters to be introduced to, all in a hurry. If you take all in stride, however, it doesn’t take too long to fill in most of the salient details. Suffice it to say, perhaps, that Molly Murphy is a recent immigrant who has improved her status in her new world to become one of the few female private investigators in that particular time and place. On page 12 she also admits to having been an artist’s model, comfortable in posing in the nude before strange men, which of course is an eye-opener, and equally of course I can only believe her.

   In any case, Miss Molly Malone is about as progressive as you could possibly get, in that particular time and place, and her love life and home life are equally eyebrow-raising, figuratively speaking. She is all-but-spoken-for with one man, she shares her home with another, and the man she really loves (it seems) is her ex-beau, Captain Daniel Sullivan of the New York Police.

   Much of this background, once the new reader has found some solid ground upon which to stand, turns out to be unnecessary in a way, since the case that Molly undertakes this time around takes her to a mansion up along the Hudson, where her task is twofold: (1) to investigate the authenticity of two females mediums who have been preying upon wealthy people who have lost loved ones, and (2) and Daniel Sullivan does not know this, to investigate the kidnapping and subsequent disappearance (and assumed death) of a young child born to Senator Barney Flynn and his wife.

   And what this means is working undercover as an unknown cousin of the senator’s, visiting from Ireland – and hence the title. What Molly does not know that this also means meeting someone from her recent past, someone whom she expected never to see again, as well as keeping her wits about her in solving the case without blowing her cover. Taking advantage of some rather limited opportunities, she does a capable enough job of investigating – enough so that the truth, in long-winded fashion (the book is over 320 pages long), does come out. Investigating, that is, in the sense of Nancy Drew, reacting rather than acting, and with little sense of doing any real deducting.

   It is a fine piece of writing, though, you should certainly not get me wrong, with quite a few serious insights into who people are and why they are that way. Once again, I should not lead you astray by saying what the book is not, as opposed to what it is, and what it is, is fine indeed. The ending also contains a considerable enticement to read the next one, to see what comes next for Molly Malone and her somewhat embattled (and bewildered) policeman friend.

FOOTNOTE. Ms. Bowen addresses this point in a short autobiographical section that she’s included on her website: “Children’s books, young adult books, adult historical romances and sagas followed [working for the BBC and Australian broadcasting] until I decided it was finally time for me to write what I enjoyed reading most … and that was mysteries.”