By JODELLE GREINER, Lifestyles Editor
June 20, 2008 10:23 am
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It had been a while since I had read Deborah Crombie’s first novel “A Share in Death” and I was really wanting to get back to her mysteries. I picked up the second in the series “All Shall Be Well” and stepped back into the English countryside with Scotland Yard “coppers” Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James.
Duncan Kincaid is surprised to come home one day from work to find his middle-aged neighbor Jasmine Dent dead. Oh, it wasn’t such a shock, Kincaid knew that Jasmine had been terminally ill with cancer, but even her home-help nurse, Felicity Howarth, felt that she had a little bit more time.
Right from the start, something feels off to Kincaid and it’s not just that Jasmine had asked for help to commit suicide from her former co-worker, a young woman named Margaret Bellamy. Margaret claims that Jasmine had changed her mind at the last minute and told Margaret she didn’t want to go through with it, that she had found the courage to continue on with what life she had left.
But little things are not adding up for Detective Superintendent Kincaid and his cop instincts are telling him that all is not as it seems. He requests a post mortem and while the results don’t shock him, neither do they answer the question: did Jasmine commit suicide or did someone help her die?
Kincaid finds out that investigating the death of someone he knows — or thought he did — is a different venture than the anonymous death. As he pieces together Jasmine’s last days and hours, trying to figure out who was the last to see her alive, and reads the journals she left, he fights to keep his emotions out of the way. He’s going to have to be sharp to figure this one out and he’s going to need all the help he can get from Sergeant Gemma James.
Crombie takes this murder mystery and gives it an intimate, cozy feel, like sitting down to tea and scones on a pleasant afternoon.
Most murder mysteries try to jolt the reader with the harshness and gruesomeness of the murder and investigation, including details you may not want to know. Crombie’s gentle narrative is soothing. This is a story you can curl up with on the couch.
The very ordinariness of this story is what makes it a bit chilling: this could really happen. It’s not a fantastic tabloid-worthy tale, it could happen to someone you know down the street.
There are several more things I enjoy about Crombie’s stories. She fills them with characters who are intriguing, not weird-eccentric. You get a wide variety of folks, young and old; married and never married; poor and rich. Jasmine grew up in India; she still surrounds herself with the colorful fabrics from that land. Kincaid’s other neighbor, Major Keith, retired military, is constantly tending the flowers on the property. Most of Crombie’s characters have a quiet dignity about them; they are just trying to do the best they can in this world, like Margaret, who’s working a dead-end job, has a loser boyfriend, Roger Leveson-Gower, and has nothing else of importance in her life except keeping an ill woman company.
I really enjoy the little details that Crombie puts into her novels to give them a British feel. Words and phrases that we don’t use here — or even that have different meaning on this side of the Atlantic Ocean — give these stories a real sense of place. The ironic thing is Crombie is a native Texan and it’s probably not as natural to her to use the phrases as it would be to a British writer who grew up using the terms.
Like her other characters, Crombie gives her leads, Kincaid and Gemma, real lives. Kincaid has a bit of a past — he’s divorced — and he’s still trying to work his way through some of that. Gemma is also divorced with a toddler son, Toby, to raise. The things she’s dealing with are in the present. Any working mom will relate to Gemma’s plight; she’s got to work and put her son in day care, but the bills are piling up and her ex-husband has stopped sending support money.
The two have a good professional opinion of each other, but are just getting to know each other as people. Their relationship, as much as the homey feel of Crombie’s storytelling, is what keeps you coming back.
The third book in the series is “Leave the Grave Green”.
Kincaid and Gemma are investigating another death: Connor Swann’s body was found floating in the Thames River. Normally, this isn’t a case for Scotland Yard, except Swann was the son-in-law of Sir Gerald and Dame Caroline Asherton, both well-known in the world of opera.
Sadly, the Ashertons have known tragedy before, and in a very similar manner. Their 12-year-old son, Matthew, drowned 20 years earlier while walking home from school with his sister, Julia — Connor Swann’s estranged wife.
While investigating, Kincaid and Gemma discover that although Julia lived at home with her parents, Sir Gerald and Dame Caroline were still on good terms with their son-in-law — and their relationship with their own daughter wasn’t as warm.
That is just the beginning of the twists that the two coppers uncover in a strange case that is anything but routine.
I like Crombie because she doesn’t follow the formula. Throw out what you expect with murder mysteries because you’re not going to get it here.
What Crombie does is more a study of human nature, psychological detective work, rather than forensic evidence from the lab. There’s a long list of suspects and you probably won’t guess whodunit, even though Crombie leaves subtle clues you can see in hindsight. This is good old track-down-the-suspects-and-interrogate-them detective work, all done with British sensibilities, of course.
And she doesn’t do it with just her suspects.
Sometimes when you work with someone, you develop certain expectations and you think that you know how they will react. Then they do something that takes you by surprise and you wonder if you really know them at all. Gemma finds herself in that position when she observes her by-the-book partner Kincaid being drawn in by the enigmatic Julia Swann.
Once again, Crombie takes this situation and does the unexpected with it — and it changes everything between Kincaid and Gemma.
This series captures you more deeply with each novel you read and you appreciate Crombie’s writing and storytelling more with each tale. To get the full effect, start with the first novel and read them in order. The murder cases can be read in any order, but the relationships of the characters progress in successive novels, along with Crombie’s writing and plotting.
If you want something a little different, something that rings truer to real-life, try Deborah Crombie’s British detective series.
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