Sun 29 Aug 2010
ANNELISE RYAN – Working Stiff. Kensington, paperback reprint, August 2010. Hardcover edition: September 2009.
The first few lines may set you back on your heels a little:
No, this isn’t the next take-off on Patricia Cornwell’s line of books, it really is a cozy, as I thought when I opened it to start reading. Telling the story in the first of a new series is Mattie Winston, former nurse and now the new deputy coroner for Sorenson, a smallish town somewhere in Wisconsin. (Not on any map I’ve found.)
It turns out that Mattie quit her former job when she found her husband, a doctor at the same hospital, having an affair with another nurse. Make that soon to be ex-husband.
But when that other nurse is found murdered, and the unfaithful Dr. Winston is a chief suspect, it is up to Mattie to put on her sleuthing shoes and see if she can’t clear his name. Complicating matters is that Steve Hurley, the hunky policeman in charge of the case is exactly that, hunky.
How long does it take before you, the reader, that this a cozy, not a Cornwell look-alike? Not long at all. Soon after that first paragraph above — which tells you something in and of itself — we learn that the coroner’s name is Izzy and he’s five foot tall, while Mattie is something like six (five foot twelve, she says).
And at the crime scene Mattie loses her panties and kicks them under a chair, she having been called on the case in the middle of night and having neglected to dress as carefully as she might have during the day.
My opinion, as always is that more than 320 pages is also more than enough to conduct a murder investigation, even one with as many tangents as this (such as getting a fashion makeover from the beautician at a local funeral parlor).
You’d like to think, though, that there would also be time enough to add a few clues to the puzzle, but no, while entertaining enough in other ways (we are as eager as Hurley is to learn about Mattie’s famous nipple incident, which happened not so long ago in her past), the investigation goes here and there and finally ends about the same time as the book does.
Coming next, book two in the series: Scared Stiff (September 2010).
August 29th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Ambivalent, eh: ‘the investigation goes here and there and finally ends about the same time as the book does’?
Though it sounds a bit sexier than most cozies. Still it seems as if it suffers a bit from what I think of as the ‘cozy syndrome,’ the tendency for the book to be about everything ‘but’ the investigation of the crime.
Though not being Patricia Cornwell is a huge recommendation for any book in my estimation.
August 30th, 2010 at 10:34 am
You have read between the lines correctly, David. This book is sexier than most cozies. To be specific, it’s a lot more uninhibited in that regard, but in no way is it as explicit as most Harlequin romances are.
Mattie and Hurley are still in that hesitant “does she / will he” stage.
But in spite of what I may have implied, but not taking anything back either, the attention paid to solving the crime is stronger in WORKING STIFF than it is in those books solved by herb shop owners and wedding planners.
That’s due to the fact that as a newly appointed deputy coroner, Mattie has at least a semi-official rationale for going around and questioning suspects. Most quilt makers and teddy bear collectors don’t.
As for Patricia Cornwell, I’m not a fan either, but I think I owe myself (and her) into giving one of her books another try, and maybe even soon.
August 31st, 2010 at 6:55 am
After that awful non fiction Ripper book, in which she nailed artist Walter Richert as the Ripper — despite the fact he had an iron tight alibi for many of the crimes and despite his eccentricities does not fit the profile of a serial killer, I don’t owe Cornwell anything (outside of fiction serial killers are never highly respected and successful artists, or anything else — by their nature they are men who failed at everything and are striking out at society for not recognizing their inate superiority — Richert was a nut, and obsessed with the Ripper — but he was also five hundred miles away from some of the crimes at a time it was virtually impossible to cross that distance in the time allotted).
Cornwell virtually pulled him out of the blue because she thought she could do DNA testing on him because he is alledged to have mixed his own blood with his paints (as I recall from the television special that went nowhere and was inconclusive — as it had to be since the Ripper left no DNA around to compare it to) thanks to his fame and because he was obsessed with violence and dark images(her psychological profile of him was a hatchet job most DA’s would have been ashamed of, and most DA’s have no shame at all). She totally ignored Donald Rumblow, the leading Ripperolgist who believes the Ripper was the butcher known as Leatherapron and the considerable evidence against Matthew John Druitt, because neither man was as ‘sexy’ a suspect as the famous artist. I suspect she would have tried to lay it at the feet of the Duke of Clarence save his alibi was even better than Richerts — he was dying. How unfair when all the good suspects insist on being innocent.
As you may have noted this did not warm me to her.
I don’t mind her making it up as she goes along in fiction, but when someone has as little respect for facts as she does regarding history I don’t feel the need to try to get into her books just because she is popular. I read her first novel and didn’t care for it. I read the Ripper book and was offended by it (an even sillier theory than Dr. Gull who was paralysed with a stroke being the Ripper). She had her chance from me.
In this case I’m not waiting for the third strike to call this one.
August 31st, 2010 at 7:06 am
The most interesting facts about Druittit as the Ripper are four fold. First, he was the man both Sir Malcolm MacNaughton and Dr. Joseph Bell (yes, ‘that’ Joe Bell) believed to be the Ripper. Second, he left a diary with his family claiming to be the Ripper. Third, he had easy access to Whitechapel through his offices in Lincoln Inns Courts (he was a barrister — unsuccesful one) and fit the only description of the Ripper from the only eye witness and was the son of doctor and had access to surgical tools. Four, and most damning, the murders stopped immediately after he committed suicide, which was hard on the heels of the Mary Kelly frenzy killing (a type killing that often comes right before a serial killer either burns out or kills themselves).
But it’s not very sexy for Jack the Ripper to be a rather mousy lawyer or Donald Rumblow’s brutal kosher butcher. Far better to ignore the experts, criminal psychology, actual science, and common sense, and blame someone famous.