Cedar Valley

by Holly Throsby

[MurderByDeath]

Not quite as good as her first book, Goodwood, but still an engrossing read.  Both are stand-alone mysteries, though the town of Goodwood does have a one-line cameo in Cedar Valley.  The writing is still lyrical, though more straight forward and humorous; the characters are still complicated people; the town still eccentric in what feels to me and my own cultural experience as akin to the Deep South.

What unfolds is a complicated plot surrounding the parallel mysteries of the man in the brown suit, and Vivian Moon, the woman who left Benny and her father when she was an infant.  As Benny pieces together fragments of Vivian's life, trying to figure out who her mother was, the police struggle to figure out the identity of the man in the brown suit.  

Throsby ties this story directly to the real-life mystery of The Somerton Man, or The Tamam Shud Case, an unsolved case from the late 1940's that remains open, and in Cedar Valley, a mystery that tantalised Vivian with its romance. As a plot device, it works really well, but also dooms the story, to a certain extent, to a mystery with no satisfying solution.  

If Goodwood and Cedar Valley are any indication, Throsby isn't interested in offering her readers a tidy solution at the end; some questions are answered, some are not.  Quite a bit of the mystery remains, although she offers readers, and Benny, just enough to piece together a framework of possibility - of probability - but no certainty.  We're left with an impression of Vivian's life; that she was memorable to all who knew her, but for all her seeking, she was both misguided and tragic.  The man in the brown suit ... well, I'll just leave off by saying he was shades of Walter G. Middy.

The story is told in 3rd person omniscient by an unnamed narrator.  It works very well, but as I said, the story wasn't as good as her first, and there were characters and scenes that were introduced that never went anywhere.  The Detective, Simmons, was, if I may be so bold as to say, a complete failure as a character; I'm not sure what Throsby was trying to accomplish, but I don't think it was the dumb asshat with brief moments of insight that she ended up with.  Benny, too, was not the best formed character, although I can see that that might have been intentional.  The rest of the cast though, were brilliantly formed, complex characters that really came alive on the page.

Overall, a genuinely enjoyable read.  Throsby is talented at writing beautifully lyrical and complex mysteries and I look forward to whatever she comes up with next.