Tue 25 Aug 2015
A PI Mystery Review: SANDRA WEST PROWELL – By Evil Means.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
SANDRA WEST PROWELL – By Evil Means. Walker, hardcover, 1993. Bantam, paperback, April 1995.
This is the first of three recorded adventures for perhaps the only fictional PI working out of Billings, Montana, a former FBI agent named Phoebe Siegel. The case seems simple enough, that of a woman who is afraid that there is something wrong at Whispering Pines, the psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of town where her daughter had recently sought help.
Phoebe is about to turn her down, since (for many reasons) she always takes the month of March off. One of the reasons is that March is the month that her brother Ben, a cop in the local police force, committed suicide. She changes her mind, though, when the mother tells her there may have been an involvement between the girl and her brother Ben, even to the extent of a police complaint just before he died.
Thus begins a long (over 350 pages) investigation into all kinds of secrets in her home town that Phoebe had never had an inkling of, many of them involving her family and friends, and she has many in both categories. The book is slow to start. It is not until page 130 or so, when Phoebe goes sneaks into Whispering Pines and convinces herself at last that Dr. Stroud is indeed up to no good, that the tale really starts to get into high gear.
In some ways, this book reminded me of several of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone stories, in which the friends and family seem to be a secondary but essential sidebar to the mystery. But in Phoebe Siegel’s case, the role they both take on simply grows and grows, insidiously so. The ending is as harrowing as any that I’ve read in a PI novel in quite a long time.
I wasn’t so sure for a while, but this one’s a keeper.
The Phoebe Siegel series —
By Evil Means (1993)
The Killing of Monday Brown (1994)
When Wallflowers Die (1996)
An Accepted Sorrow (unpublished)
According to the Thrilling Detective website, By Evil Means was nominated for the Hammett Prize, and both that novel and The Killing of Monday Brown were nominated for a Shamus.
August 25th, 2015 at 10:30 pm
Sandra and I had the same agent when we started out, so I met her a few times and liked her and her books. She had some success early and then stopped writing. I’ve often wondered why and what happened to her.
August 25th, 2015 at 10:53 pm
There seems to be some mystery about her. The title of the fourth but unpublished book I found on the Thrilling Detective website, with no other information about it.
There is a blog devoted to her at
http://sandrawestprowell.info/
but while a fourth book is mentioned, the folks running the blog do not seem to have ever heard from her.
I found an interview she did for CNN online at
http://edition.cnn.com/chat/transcripts/2000/5/30/prowell/
but that was done 15 years ago. She was born in 1944, making her 70 years old, assuming she is still with us. And that’s all I know.
August 26th, 2015 at 9:14 pm
It happens that a writer has a little success at times but not enough to keep slogging away. A new contract doesn’t come along or a series doesn’t do as well as hoped … sometimes they mean to get back to the keyboard, but never do.