Fatally Flawed

The Butterfly Effect by Eve Zaremba

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I think I started on the wrong book. This is the fifth one in the Helen Keremos mystery series and the author doesn't really have much left to pad the book with. In other words, we don't really find out much about Helen, other than she is a middle-aged lesbian P.I. with supreme confidence in her abilities and almost no fear. There's nothing wrong with this combination, but it's not much in itself. We rarely get a glimpse into Helen's psyche, her feelings, or her past. I suspect the first book or two in the series might have exhausted this.

In this one, Keremos is on her way to Hong Kong on business when she gets caught up in the murder of a Japanese Yakuza member who may have been involved in art forgeries so perfect that they are nearly impossible to detect. Pretty heady stuff for a start. But all the subsequent twists and turns are so difficult to follow that you might end up flipping to the end just to get it over with. I stayed with it to the enc, which may not have been a good idea.

The main premise--that someone has developed a method of making perfect forgeries of stolen paintings--right down to the molecular level of the paint--is a new and unique concept to the genre, almost taking it into the realm of science fiction. Trouble is, we never learn who was doing these forgeries. In fact, from what we know about all the characters, none had the requisite knowledge to even attempt this, much less succeed at it. This is what I call a Fatal Flaw in a mystery--something that, no matter how good the rest of is is (and this one is none too good)--makes the novel as a whole a failure.

I looked forward to reading about Helen Keremos, who is sometimes referred to as the first lesbian detective. As a writer of lesbian mysteries myself, I hope I learned something from Zaremba. I also plan on going back and reading at least the first one in the series to see how the character of Helen was developed. As for The Butterfly Effect (not a good title), I'll give it a 2.2. Not really bad, but certainly not recommended.



View all my reviews