Wed 13 Feb 2019
Archived Mystery Review: M. D. LAKE – Amends for Murder.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[5] Comments
M. D. LAKE – Amends for Murder. Peggy O’Neill #1. Avon, paperback original, November 1989.
A frustrating book. There aren’t many detectives who are female campus cops, and the idea produces lots of good possibilities, most of which are only hinted at in this book. Peggy O’Neill is her name, and she’s the one who finds the body of a murdered professor of English.
Determined to show the city police a thing or two, Peggy then uncovers some of the dead man’s more unseemly past. What bothered me was the way she knew things before she (and the reader) was told, and the way the killer was caught, by sheer accident.
The Peggy O’Neill series —
1. Amends for Murder (1989)
2. Cold Comfort (1990)
3. Poisoned Ivy (1992)
4. A Gift for Murder (1992)
5. Murder by Mail (1993)
6. Once upon a Crime (1995)
7. Grave Choices (1995)
8. Flirting with Death (1996)
9. Midsummer Malice (1997)
10. Death Calls the Tune (1999)
February 13th, 2019 at 11:04 pm
The way this kind of thing usually works, if an author’s eschews a first name withe use of initials, it means that the author is female trying to pose as male. Or at least it used to.
In this case, though, it’s quite the opposite. M. D. Lake was the pseudonym for Allen Simpson, a professor of Scandanavian literature at the University of Minnesota.
Obviously he (or the publisher) knew (or assumed) that cozy readers wouldn’t read books written by a man. I wonder if that’s still true today.
February 14th, 2019 at 7:19 am
I read the first five of these at the time, though like you I found them frustrating. I liked the setting and thought they had potential, but they were never as good as they could have been or I hoped they would be. I see that I have the other five sitting on the shelf, unread, two decades later, which I guess says something (both good and bad).
February 14th, 2019 at 5:48 pm
I may have read one more in the series — as I recall, Peggy O’Neill was pleasant and engaging enough to warrant another chance — but no more than that. But ten books in a series such as this is no mean achievement, so readers other than ourselves must have found more substance to them than we did, Jeff.
February 14th, 2019 at 5:34 pm
One common thread I have noticed in cozies is that the detectives tend not to detect, but to know who the killer is either from some insight or intuition, even when they are semi pros who should be gathering evidence, then too often the killer isn’t really caught or accused, but does something incredibly stupid and fesses up.
I suppose it is satisfying for cozy lovers, but for detective story fans, even thriller fans where the rules are looser, the idea that who did it and how they are caught is secondary to everything else can make these very difficult reads.
February 14th, 2019 at 5:50 pm
Yes. For me books such as this succeed or fail on how sound the detective work is. I don’t remember the details of this one, but obviously it didn’t come up to par, as far as I was concerned.