Sun 11 Feb 2024
An Archived PI Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: LINDA GRANT – Lethal Genes.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters[4] Comments
LINDA GRANT – Lethal Genes. Cat Saylor #5. Scribner, hardcover, 1996. Ivy, paperback, 1997.
With her four previous books Grant has become one of my favorite female authors. She isn’t a glib as Grafton, or as intense and angst-ful as Paretsky, or as focused on relationships as Muller, but her stories have substance and well-developed characters, and are very well written. Her business-world settings are a refreshing change, too.
San Francisco Pl Catherine Saylor steps into a new world when she takes a case involving a biotech lab at the University of California. Someone is sabotaging experiments in cutting-edge dot com gene research, and no one there can figure out why, much less who.
Cat finds a fair amount of academic jealousy, and some pretty lax security procedures, but the culprit and a motive prove more elusive. Then someone dies, and someone else is killed, and the com patch becomes a deadly place.
My only cavil first off: the villain as eventually revealed wasn’t totally convincing to me, because I didn’t think the character and motivation were nearly well-enough established. That out of the way, I thought this was Grant’s usual excellent job. She focuses more on the crime and less on the personal life of the protagonist than do most of the female, authors, which is at all to say that Saylor is not a well-drawn and engaging character — she is. Grant’s first-person narration is smooth and paced nicely, and her prose straightforward. She remains one of my favorites.
The Catherine Sayler series —
1. Random Access Murder (1988)
2. Blind Trust (1990)
3. Love Nor Money (1991)
4. A Woman’s Place (1994)
5. Lethal Genes (1996)
6. Vampire Bytes (1998)
February 11th, 2024 at 9:20 pm
I remember reading the first two in the series, and like Barry, enjoying them very much. I drifted away, though, and while I bought the rest of them as soon as they came out in paperback, I never found the time to read them.
There were too many good PI series going on at the time, both male and female ones, and it would have been awfully difficult for any mystery reader to keep up with them all.
February 11th, 2024 at 10:24 pm
I enjoyed a couple of these enough, but ironically everything Barry said as to why he preferred this series to Grafton, Paretsky, and Muller are exactly why those other series sold better and lasted longer, the glibness, the angst, the focus on their relationships and private lives all gave those other writers strong bases, and characters readers connected with and returned to book after book.
February 11th, 2024 at 11:41 pm
Is it safe to say that Grafton, Paretsky, and Muller gave their female readership what they wanted to read, while others like Grant. with her no-nonsense traditional PI approach, appealed to men but not so much women?
February 12th, 2024 at 3:14 am
And I think it safe to say Paretsky was a better more serious writer, Grafton better at the basics of plot and construction, and Muller a mix of the other two’s virtues and her own. Their characters felt created* in the way Spenser or other major contemporary eyes of the period did, which wasn’t true of Cat.
The market was looking for strong female voices that could supply both the toughness and the more traditional mystery and suspense goods in a fresh way and while Grant was every bit as good as Barry says, I don’t think she delivered that extra the other three did.
Sales alone and women readers aren’t the only reason books by those three soon became an event.
I was reading Paretsky as a major new voice in the field when she started and not just a writer who featured a female private eye. Within one or two books she, Grafton, and Muller were already stretching beyond that niche plus bringing in new readers.
All eventually settled into certain patterns familiar to any long running series, but early on they were capturing some of that male audience too. Paretsky pretty much still holds on to it.
*coined by Rex Stout as best I know “created characters” are those that take on a life beyond the books they are in like Stout’s Wolfe and Archie. Stout argued the generally shallow characters outside the leads in such books were because few books could bear the weight of more than one or two created characters per book. They have a full story arc and everyone else is background.