I enjoyed Linda Barnes’ early Carlotta Carlyle mysteries, but haven’t followed the series in recent years. Having finished Lie Down with the Devil, the 12th mystery featuring the Boston-based Private Investigator, I can’t wait to go back and read the ones I missed.
Carlotta’s at her best in this book: smart, courageous, and persistent. Her actions are gutsy, but measured rather than incautious. The action moves from downtown Boston to a shooting range on the Harbor Islands to a pastoral mental health institute to Cape Cod. Barnes’ deft descriptions bring these settings to life in a way that makes you feel you are right beside Carlotta as she teases apart and clears away layers of mystery.
Early in the story, Carlotta tracks her long-time friend Mooney to the Boston Police Department’s firing range on Moon Island. “Pulling into a space in the level gravel lot, I opened the cab door and sniffed an unexpectedly salty breeze. Living in Cambridge, the way I do, you can almost forget the proximity of the Atlantic. I inhaled the sea air gratefully. There’s something cleansing about the ocean, all that green water licking the shore, endless and timeless, soothing and hypnotizing...” Her relationship with Mooney, who is her former boss, proves both a help and a distraction as her newest case unfolds.
Also distracting Carlotta is the mystery surrounding her runaway fiance, mobster Sam Gianelli. She misses him and wants to help him, but also resents being kept in the dark about his “situation.” At one point she considers “borrowing” his Jaguar, but “The Jag would have been a lousy tail car. Too conspicuous, I told myself, scrunched behind the wheel of another aged Ford cab. The bucket seat in Sam’s car would have put me instantly to sleep, and the heating unit that kept it toasty under your butt, who needed it? The musky smell would have made me nostalgic and I didn’t need that either. The Spartan chill of Gloria’s cabs would keep me alert...”
Even as she takes on the new case, Carlotta realizes her judgement is not entirely trustworthy, because she is angst-ridden over the still unfolding recovery of her “little sister” Paolina. Recently retrieved by Carlotta from a kidnapper, the teenager is in a mental health institution for her own safety, and refuses to speak to Carlotta. The private investigator’s distraction with Paolina and her daily check-in calls become a factor in the story when Carlotta takes a few missteps.
In pursuit of the true identity of a client who lied to her, Carlotta finds herself parked in a run-down part of Boston. “Two overturned plastic chairs decorated the weedy yard of a two-family with peeling beige paint. The adjoining house was green with unfortunate yellow trim. The high, narrow structures, too close to the street and too close to each other, had stingy lawns and forbidding chain-link fences.”
Later, on the run from both the good guys and the bad, she holes up in a shack on Cape Cod. “There were two main rooms, one up, one down, connected by a contraption that was more ladder than staircase. The room on the bottom level had a tiny bathroom in a curtained alcove. The top room had a galley kitchen against a narrow wall, a child-sized refrigerator, a two-burner stove.”
The pace starts out a bit slow due to the intertwining threads of the case at hand and Carlotta’s multiple distractions, but it soon picks up. The reader learns more about Carlotta’s past, and by the time the story ends and all the loose threads are tied up, has great hopes for Carlotta’s future.
No comments:
Post a Comment