Sun 31 Jul 2016
Mystery Review: JANET DAWSON – Kindred Crimes.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
JANET DAWSON – Kindred Crimes. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1990. Fawcett Crest, paperback, May 1992.
This is the first of fifteen recorded cases tackled and solved by Oakland-based PI Jeri Howard, including four novellas, and it’s a good one. I’m not alone in holding that opinion. Kindred Crimes won the St. Martin’s Press/PWA contest for best first private eye novel. It was also nominated in the best first novel category for the Shamus, the Macavity and the Anthony.
In this novel Jeri is hired by a forlorn husband whose wife left their baby son with his grandparents, cleaned out their joint checking account and completely disappeared. Using nothing more than feet and wheels on the ground, Jeri discovers that the missing woman had married him under a phony name, and that her brother had been convicted of killing their parents when they were still children.
This is a tough-minded detective story. Hints of child abuse immediately come to Jeri’s mind. If you don’t care for detective stories in which the detective gets too emotionally involved with the case she is working on, this may not be the book for you.
Dawson is a smooth but not overly slick writer, and the puzzle aspect is as well done as the characters. If you decide that this is the kind of book you’d like to read, I think you’ll see why Jeri Howard has managed to hang around for quite a while now.
The Jeri Howard series —
1. Kindred Crimes (1990)
2. Till the Old Men Die (1993)
3. Take a Number (1993)
4. Don’t Turn Your Back On the Ocean (1994)
5. Nobody’s Child (1995)
6. A Credible Threat (1996)
7. Witness to Evil (1997)
8. Where the Bodies Are Buried (1998)
9. A Killing at the Track (2000)
10. Bit Player (2011)
11. Jeri Howard Casebook: 4 Stories (2011)
12. Cold Trail (2015)
July 31st, 2016 at 5:58 am
I read this book 26 years ago the year it came out, but have no other memory of it than that. I never read another and am almost astonished to read that she is still writing and publishing them today and has had over a dozen since.
In those days I was reading a lot of PI fiction. Today, not so much.
August 1st, 2016 at 9:31 pm
I notice some gaps in publishing history. That could explain how I missed this one completely. Sounds like one worth dipping into.
August 2nd, 2016 at 12:24 pm
There is a big gap between #9 and #10. The latter was published by Perseverance Press, which specializes in continuing various author’s series characters after they’ve been dropped by major publishers. I hadn’t known about these later ones either.