Shallow as a badly dug grave

I know that in music, a lot of people will wait until an artist's second or third album before they will buy. By that time the artist will have learned more and become more mature. I agree most of the time. The same may be true of literature. Oliver Twist is better than The Pickwick Papers, for instance. And Roderick Hudson is better than Watch and Ward.

But in novels that are part of a series, I'll always want to read the first one first. Why? Because the first novel is the one in which the author sets up the characters, the characters' surroundings, mannerisms, friends, and habits. Stieg Larsson's Millennium series is a case in point. Both Lizbeth Salander and Michael Bloomquist are given the complete treatment in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo so that he can relax a little in books 2 and 3 and concentrate more on plot. We feel that we know these characters and are anxious to see what they will get up to next.

I made a mistake in reading Eve Zaremba's fifth Helen Keremos novel before I read the first. Everything was already set and I felt like I was missing out on a lot of background that would have helped me know Helen better and respect her more.

But in this case, not much was lost. In the first Keremos novel, Reason to Kill, we find out next to nothing about the female detective other than that she is a female detective that lives in Canada and has a fearless, no-nonsense approach to people and situations. For all the (belated) hype about Helen being the first lesbian detective, there is actually no reference to her sexuality in this first novel at all. At one point one of her suspects calls her a "dyke," but I have heard more than one man use that term on women who simply refuse to go out with them.

The novel is short, not much more than a novella; not much room to give a complete background on Helen or on anything else. The mystery itself is not a bad one, although the actual solution is kind of ridiculous. But so are the solutions in most of the popular TV shows, like Bones, for instance--I can't speak to the actual Kathy Reichs novels because I've never read one.

Yet I am giving this a 3 instead of a 2 because Zaremba herself states that she is trying to stay within the hard-boiled detective tradition, and this she does. She writes about gay issues here, too--an important topic not only when she wrote it but now as well.

Maybe I'm griping because I expect mysteries to be as well-clothed and as stiffly underpinned as more literary novels, having likable characters with depth and feeling. This is actually what I am trying to do in my own "Small Town" series. You might like your mysteries like those of J.D. Robb--crank 'em out and get 'em sold--the more the better. If so, go for it. You might like this one, too.