Review of The Fault Tree

The Fault Tree: A Mystery
By Louise Ure
St. Martin’s Minotaur; 2007; 336 pages; $24.95 (hardback)

When I signed up to attend the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in 2007, one of the assignments I gave myself to prepare for the conference was to read the first book of at least six of the faculty members I’d be encountering there. This exercise exposed me to some wonderful writers I hadn’t read before, and one of those was Louise Ure.


Her first mystery, Forcing Amaryllis, was a real pleasure to read. Her descriptions brought the southwest setting alive and her protagonist was a strong, smart, outspoken woman I enjoyed getting to know. So I was more than a little disappointed when, while talking to Louise during one of the conference lunch breaks, I learned that she considered Forcing Amaryllis a “stand alone” book rather than the beginning of a series. Her second book, which was due out in late 2007, would feature a new protagonist.


Just before The Fault Tree came out, I received another unwelcome shock: the protagonist of the new mystery was BLIND, and much of the story was told through her sightless point of view! I cringed. I’m a very visual person, and when I read, a movie plays in my head. For that matter, when I write, I’m describing a movie I see in my head – it requires some discipline and a lot of revising on my part to incorporate senses other than sight.


With these two strikes against it, I couldn’t imagine how The Fault Tree could possibly meet the expectations that Forcing Amaryllis had set.


I am happy to report that my preconceived notions were wrong.


Cadence Moran is an antisocial young blind woman with an ear for trouble. She makes her living as a mechanic who uses her senses of hearing and touch to troubleshoot engine problems that cannot be solved by reading meters or thumbing through a shop manual. Socially isolated as much by choice as by her “handicap,” she taps her way through life with a hand-carved cane, choosing well-known physical and emotional paths that hold no surprises and no variations – paths she’s so familiar with they’ve truly become ruts.


Early in the book, Ure immerses us in Moran’s world through her character’s keen sense of hearing: “A lawn sprinkler ratcheted around several yards to my left…and a horn honked down by the Guardian Motel on the corner. Although the air was cooling, Apache cicadas still thrummed in concert from the cottonwood tree down the block. Farther away I heard the dentist’s drill whine of a Japanese motorcycle…”


While navigating the virtual rut between the shop where she works and her tidy little house, Moran is nearly hit by a speeding driver. She soon discovers that the car was likely barreling away from the scene of a murder, and goes to the cops with what little evidence she can offer: a distinctive engine noise and the smell of antifreeze. The cops give little credence to her story until she has another violent encounter with the same – at least by the sound and smell of it – vehicle. But by then the police interest seems to be too little, too late. For the killer doesn’t realize that Moran is blind, and wants her permanently silenced.


As the story unfolds, Ure skillfully rotates viewpoints from Moran’s first-person narration to the villain’s and cops’ third-person points of view. In these differing points of view, descriptions of place help reveal character even as they anchor the reader in the Tucson setting.


The bad guy’s hideout is described as “Thin walled and tin roofed, with acres of creosote-choked desert between him and the nearest neighbor, the house was the perfect hideaway. No tourists or fancy buildings out here. Just rusty old vehicles and worthless land. Everybody on the shitty side of town had something to hide.” This character has fallen backwards into a quagmire of crime, and throughout the story I found myself rooting for him to make the right choice and find redemption.


The appealing sense of humor of one of the detectives, August Dupree, comes to light when he goes to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum to interview a friend of the murder victim. “Dupree’s favorite part was still Prairie Dog Town, a patch of sandy soil surrounded by a waist-high wall and studded with a warren of small holes the prairie dogs dug for concealment. It looked like a life-size version of a Whack-A-Mole game…”


Ure does a good job of escalating the action and the stakes as the story moves along. The backstory of the accident that resulted in Moran’s blinding eight years before the story opens is woven nicely into the novel’s fabric. Moran is an appealing character with understandable flaws and believable fears. Once she is jolted out of the narrow rut of her self-circumscribed life, she stretches and grows in both the practical and emotional realms.


Coincidence is always a tough thing for me to swallow in a mystery, and I did find it a little hard to believe that the only friend Moran has works as a crime scene technician for the Tucson police. The pigheaded refusal of one of the detectives to give any credence to a blind woman’s testimony also seemed, if not melodramatic, at least to drag on through too much of the story – I found myself hoping that a real-life cop wouldn’t be such a jerk, or at least wouldn't be such a persistent jerk.


But these minor flaws did not mar my enjoyment of The Fault Tree. I found myself turning pages quickly, unwilling to set the book down, and staying up later than I should to read just one more chapter…always the mark of a good mystery.


The Fault Tree more than met the expectations set by Forcing Amaryllis. I look forward to Louise Ure’s next endeavor, even if it is another “stand alone.”