Fri 27 Aug 2010
Archived Review: ANN PARKER – Silver Lies.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[2] Comments
ANN PARKER – Silver Lies. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, September 2003; trade paperback, April 2006.
A first novel, and for a mystery, it’s a long one, some 420 pages, but for a work of historical fiction, the page count might be about right. It’s 1879, and Leadville is a booming small metropolis in Colorado, the inhabitants of which are afflicted with “ever-present cold, lingering homesickness, and the pangs of silver fever.”
Inez Stannert is one of the few women in the town, co-owner of a flourishing saloon, and since the town marshal seems to be totally uninterested, she’s also the only person willing to investigate the possible murder of the town’s assayer, who’s been found trampled to death on the frigid muck of a nearby street.
Adding to Inez’ concerns is her husband, who’s been missing for several months, but the new minister in town seems more than willing to help her forget. The legendary Bat Masterton also makes an appearance, but it’s little more than a cameo, as Inez and the Reverend J.B. Sands end up doing all of the heavy lifting.
As a mystery, it’s adequate. It works better as a historical novel — life in this rough-and-tumble corner of the world is brought to life quite effectively in two quite opposite and surprising ways: the scenic wonder of 19th century Colorado and the wretched environment it had to have been for anyone actually trying to live there.
The story in Silver Lies is less effective as far as the romantic elements are concerned, falling prey to some fairly stand-by cliches, and much of the author’s work is undone, paradoxically, by some better-than-average characterization that has to be retrofitted, and abruptly so, to make the rather lurid conclusion work.
Acceptable, and maybe more so, depending on where your interests lie, but if there’s a paperback forthcoming, you might choose to put it off till then.
Note: This review has been revised slightly since it first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
The Inez Stannert “Silver Rush Mystery” series —
1. Silver Lies (2003)
2. Iron Ties (2006)
3. Leaden Skies (2009)
August 27th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
Leadville about fifty years later was the model for Dashiell Hammett’s ‘Personville/Poisonville’ in RED HARVEST, and to some extent the Colorado town Michael Shayne cleans up in one of his early outings when he was still married to Phyllis. I think there is a fairly recent western called LEADVILLE, but I can’t recall who wrote it, just have a sort of vague picture of the cover in my head.
However the setting sounds better than the sleuth or the mystery in this one, so I will likely pass unless there is a more enthusiastic response to a later book.
After turning into a virtual ghost town Leadville has recovered and made itself over into a nice tourist mecca, and should you find yourself in southern Colorado it is well worth a visit. In just the right mood you half expect to see Baby Doe Tabor and Molly Brown peeking out from the windows of the restored mansions.
In it’s day though it was a wild little town, one of the wildest in the West, and that’s saying a lot. Having grown up in the Southwest and West, it is sometimes a shock to be walking along in some of these smallish towns and look up and see the word SALOON writ large in faded paint on the side of what is now a furniture store or grocery, and spy the odd historical marker commemorating a famous shoot out, hold up, or other event. The Wild West a lot closer than you think sometimes both historically and factually.
August 27th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
SILVER LIES gets almost rave reviews from the readers on Amazon, averaging well over four stars out of five.
And from her website: “The first in the series, Silver Lies, won the Willa Award for Historical Fiction and the Colorado Gold Award. Silver Lies was chosen a best mystery of the year by Publishers Weekly and The Chicago Tribune, and was a finalist for the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award as well as for the Western Writers Association’s Spur Award for Best Novel of the West.”
So I may be wrong about this one, but reading my review again, I see no reason not to stand behind anything I said.