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Kate Fansler Mystery #10
The Players Come Again
Amanda Cross has written her most uncommon work to date, as a academic Kate Fansler takes her detecting skills to the world of literary skullduggery. Kate musr unravel the secret of the Foxx family women--unusual women guarding an even more unusual msytery.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
161 people want to read
About the author
Amanda Cross
56 books57 followersA psuedonym of Carolyn G. Heilbrun.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
August 4, 2014
Like some other readers, I spent much of this novel wondering where the mystery was - the mystery aspect only turned up in the last chapter - while nonetheless absorbed in the story of Kate's quest for knowledge about the long-deceased wife of an even more long-deceased famous writer.
Or, alternatively, one could consider the whole thing as a kind of meditation on several deep mysteries: youth and aging, the roles of women, change over time, the value of literature, the problems of fame.
I looked it up: Cross's first Kate Fansler mystery was published in 1964; this one, in 1990. The author herself was 64 in 1990, roughly the age of the three women at the novel's heart. In 1964, she was 38 - in fact, she was born in 1926 and would have been 16 in 1942.
And friends, unless you've lived through a similar time period or have read a lot about it, you have no fucking idea how much things have changed since 1942 or even 1964. Or since 1990, for that matter. That's what the novel is about; the mystery thing was just an excuse. Read it and learn.
Or, alternatively, one could consider the whole thing as a kind of meditation on several deep mysteries: youth and aging, the roles of women, change over time, the value of literature, the problems of fame.
I looked it up: Cross's first Kate Fansler mystery was published in 1964; this one, in 1990. The author herself was 64 in 1990, roughly the age of the three women at the novel's heart. In 1964, she was 38 - in fact, she was born in 1926 and would have been 16 in 1942.
And friends, unless you've lived through a similar time period or have read a lot about it, you have no fucking idea how much things have changed since 1942 or even 1964. Or since 1990, for that matter. That's what the novel is about; the mystery thing was just an excuse. Read it and learn.
November 14, 2009
I was expecting a mystery, and maybe that expectation made me impatient with this book, but 'The Players Come Again' makes me feel like I was too hard on Agatha Christie's non-mystery mystery novel 'Passenger to Frankfurt'. That may not have had a mystery, but at least it was exciting, if nonsensical. The shocks were crazy, but genuinely shocking. And the characters spoke English like normal, albeit upper-crusty people.
'The Players Come Again' is an "investigation" in which the female protagonist has a series of conversations in which everything is revealed to her. And I don't mean revealed in the sense of her figuring it all out, I mean everybody just tells her everything. Very slowly. And it's pretty predictable. Along the way, she is constantly congratulated for being such a great interviewer/investigator, which just makes the whole process even more unbearable. To rub salt in the reader's wounds, even the casual moments -- that are supposedly a break from all this intense drama of polite conversation about history -- are carried out by non-humans. The tone is so affected, so self-consciously clever that nobody ever quotes anything without making sure to reference it and reflect on where they first read it, speaks in any kind of vulgarity without drawing great attention to how naughty and rebellious they are, refrains from launching into lectures on British literature, or talks like a human being. The main character's (allegedly) warm and share-happy marriage involves such casual banter as this line, " 'One is carried away,' Reed said sternly, 'when one drinks single-malt scotch: that is one of its beautiful qualities.'" The closest thing the book has to an actual conflict is speedily resolved to everyone's benefit, using the fewest contractions and best vocabulary possible.
I read the whole thing in one Saturday afternoon, all the way to the end, because I was desperately hoping for a last-minute twist to generate some final interest or excitement. It never came.
'The Players Come Again' is an "investigation" in which the female protagonist has a series of conversations in which everything is revealed to her. And I don't mean revealed in the sense of her figuring it all out, I mean everybody just tells her everything. Very slowly. And it's pretty predictable. Along the way, she is constantly congratulated for being such a great interviewer/investigator, which just makes the whole process even more unbearable. To rub salt in the reader's wounds, even the casual moments -- that are supposedly a break from all this intense drama of polite conversation about history -- are carried out by non-humans. The tone is so affected, so self-consciously clever that nobody ever quotes anything without making sure to reference it and reflect on where they first read it, speaks in any kind of vulgarity without drawing great attention to how naughty and rebellious they are, refrains from launching into lectures on British literature, or talks like a human being. The main character's (allegedly) warm and share-happy marriage involves such casual banter as this line, " 'One is carried away,' Reed said sternly, 'when one drinks single-malt scotch: that is one of its beautiful qualities.'" The closest thing the book has to an actual conflict is speedily resolved to everyone's benefit, using the fewest contractions and best vocabulary possible.
I read the whole thing in one Saturday afternoon, all the way to the end, because I was desperately hoping for a last-minute twist to generate some final interest or excitement. It never came.
December 2, 2022
I had never read Amanda Cross before reading this book and was surprised. It was an unusual mystery book and found under the mystery section at my local library. However it had more to do with unraveling secrets in a family than hunting a murderer. However what I liked about it was the intelligence of the women involved and how they would quote from different writers which I like very much. I will check into her further. OK I guess I’ll tell you a bit about the story; the main thrust is that the protagonist is an author of some repute and she is asked to write a biography of a famous writer‘s wife.
September 28, 2022
review of
Amanda Cross's The Players Come Again
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 24, 2022
For my complete review, go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticC...
I often look for writers new to me to read. This search seems most prominent in crime fiction & science fiction but, really, it's across the board in every area. This is the 1st bk I've read by Cross. It's called "A Kate Fansler Mystery" & Cross is advertised on the back cover as the "queen of the American literary whodunit". I don't know what the rest of Cross's work is like but this seemed less like crime fiction, less like a "whodunit" & more like a novel w/ a feminist bone to pick. That, for me, was both its strongest AND its weakest point - strongest b/c that made the work somewhat unique for me as a mystery & weakest b/c the bone being picked was too propagandistic for me & that detracted from my narrative engagement. It begin sw/ a quote from Virginia Woolf:
""The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding. Wander no more, I say; this is the end. The oblong has been set upon the square; the spiral is on top. We have been hauled over the shingle, down to the sea. The players come again."
"—Virginia Woolf,
The Waves" - p -ii
Quoting Woolf is a sort of warning to me of things to come on the propagandistic end of things. When I was in the bkstore business I was very aware of the many volumes of Woolf letters that were available. Woolf was obviously a highly respected writer. I read her Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, & The Voyage Out. I expected to like Orlando the most but remember being disatisfied w/ it.. it seemed to lose narrative force. I enjoyed The Voyage Out the most. I still need to read more by her. At least one person has recommended The Waves to me as the most experimental of her novels.
Saying "warning" in the above paragraph is a bit too heavy-handed. Woolf, Cross, & 'James Tiptree Jr.' (Alice Sheldon) all committed suicide. I'm more or less always saddened by suicides & sympathetic to them enuf to wish they'd been happier. But another thing that they share in common is that they were all wealthy people who complained about the maltreatment of women, themselves included by implication. From my POV they were, instead, very privileged & enjoyed a lifestyle so spoiled that it's hard for me to feel any sympathy for them. I have far more profound sympathy for working class women in prison who got mandatory life sentences w/o parole than I do for someone who feels that they're not reaping the full benefits of what's, nonetheless, a very entitled class position. That sd, I think Sheldon is a great SF writer. I might feel that Cross is a great writer too after reading more by her.
"Kate bethought herself, laughing, of John le Carré, in whose books she delighted. Now, if one could only get John le Carré's British secret service to do the groundwork for a biography. In five days, they could discover all there was to know about a person's past, present, and likely future: they tapped telephones, undertook interviews on phony excuses, learned all a person's haunts, habits, what and where they drank, ate, made love, hung out, and worked. Of course, the subject of the secret service's remarkable endeavors was alive and in a position to spy for England." - p 15
THAT took me by surprise: 1st: a liking for Le Carrés work, something referred to more than once in the novel; 2nd: an uncritical admiration for the surveillance state.
"Tapping telephones, in the end, might give you information, but it did not give you understanding. Kate smiled. Thanks be for the unpredictabilities of human nature. It was not that the likes of Hoover and the British secret service lacked for answers; what they lacked was the right questions.
"Which a biographer might ask? Which she, Kate Fansler, might ask? Kate had a totally indefensible belief in destiny" - pp 15-16
I'd say it's considerably more than a matter of the "right questions" but, instead, a matter of an inflexible sense of duty to oppressive ideological norms as opposed to a liberatory attitude - or "understanding", as Cross expresses it. Fansler, the detective-professor, has the job or writing a biography, not one of discovering the grounds for prosecution or persecution thru surveillance.
"All of Kate's "cases" had called upon, if not exactly needed, her literary skills honed in the world of academic criticism and scholarship. She attracted those cases which called for her particular talents, or which seemed to. That was why she was not, all other more obvious reasons apart, a private investigator rather than a professor of literature." - p 16
That intrigued me. It also helped prompt me to learn more about the author & the degree to wch Fansler is the author's avatar.
"Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (January 13, 1926 – October 9, 2003) was an American academic at Columbia University, the first woman to receive tenure in the English department, and a prolific feminist author of academic studies. In addition, beginning in the 1960s, she published numerous popular mystery novels with a woman protagonist, under the pen name of Amanda Cross." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn...
Cross / Heilbrun's having been "the first woman to receive tenure in the English department" both astonishes me & endears her to me. I don't know when she got her tenure but given that she didn't get her PHD until 1959 I'll speculate that she didn't get tenure until the 1960s. Whatever the case may be I find it truly shameful of academia to've not recognized any woman's teaching talent in the English department before this time. Of course, the discrimination against women participating in higher education wd be a major contributing factor in that. Maybe there were few contenders for such tenure prior to Cross / Heilbrun's time. Such a ridiculous degree of sexism & bigotry seems like an idiocy of the past but it happened in my lifetime. That's truly disgusting.
Fansler's challenge is to write a biography of the wife of a famous male modernist writer, someone felt to've been neglected & overshadowed by her husband's fame.
"I suspect that, as with many declared masterpieces, his novel was ardently read by scholars and skimmed or ignored by those intelligent ones, few enough in every country, who, uninstructed, read books constantly and eagerly. Unlike Virginia Woolf, but like James Joyce or Marcel Proust, he was more of an academic's than a reader's passion. Perhaps he was nearer to Proust than Joyce. Certianly he stood, as I now understand, together with these two and T. S. Eliot, at the center of modernism as it was conceived in academic departments and learned books and articles. Unlike Joyce or Proust, however, his central character was a woman." - p 29
Whew! As a widely read person I find the above to be completely insupportable & sexist - but also more than a bit twisted given the author's actual position as an academic & her protagonist's position as a scholar. Cross essentially criticizes scholars for ardently reading certain bks & separates them from the "intelligent ones" who she claims read other things. I'm NOT an academic, I'm a self-directed reader, & I've read somewhere between 4,000 & 5,000 bks. I've read, as noted above, 3 by Woolf - & just about everything by Joyce. I've had little interest in Proust &, having read a little by Eliot, close to no interest in T. S.. SO where do I fit in her grossly oversimplistic spectrum? I look for originality & complexity in bks & found them more in Joyce's Ulysses & Finnegans Wake than just about anywhere else. IMO, the reason why so few people read those 2 works of Joyce's is b/c they find them too difficult, most people don't seek out difficulty. I seriously doubt, tho, that Woolf is read that much either - both Woolf & Joyce seem more like examples of Modernist writers chosen by academics than they are people preferred by Cross' very hypothetical avid reader. That reader, it seems to me, is more likely to read Harlan Cobin or some-such.
"In the years between the time when Dorinda and I met and the time when Nellie came, books were the chief source of our fantasies and the major topic of conversation. I remember with particular clarity when we read Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, and both dreamed that a filmmaker would decide to make a movie of that novel and cast one of us as Portia, the adolescent heroine." - p 34
I've never heard of Elizabeth Bowen but thanks to the mention of her in Cross's novel I've decided to buy one of her bks. I asked the great oracle for a recommendation & got The Heat of the Day so, tomorrow, I'll get that one (I'd do it now except that today's a "spend nothing" day for me, my 94th this yr). I like the literateness of this bk, it's different from every other mystery I've ever read.
"But the Capehart, which occupied a huge cabinet, had its own special mechanism. Mechanical hands emerged and turned the record. After the record had been played on both sides, the hands flung it to the other end of the cabinet where it landed on a felt-covered slide. Sometimes the Capehart became angry—at the music, at us, at being overworked?—and it would fling the records across the room." - p 40
I'm a sucker for descriptions of unusual recording playback devices. I like to imagine this one playing one of my records: Usic minus the Square Root of Negative One ( https://www.ebay.com/itm/323431803478 ), side 1, perhaps, or Mechanically Repetitive Rerecorded Records RECORD ( https://www.etsy.com/listing/23589117... ), side 2. I like imagining that instead of getting angry the Capehart wd fall in love w/ the record(s) & caress them in ways it's never been seen to do before. If anyone has a working Capehart that they'd like me to make a movie of let me know.
While this bk was copyrighted in 1990, it's written about an earlier era in the same century, an era of much more limited conventional options for women.
"Eleanor and her sister-in-law Hilda, who married Emile Foxx, came from wildly disparate backgrounds and classes, but they were alike in being denied a chance even to go to college, much less to prepare for a career not emphatically female. So Eleanor had the choice of training to be a nurse, a schoolteacher, or a secretary, and chose the latter because she had had enough of nursing and children as the oldest in her large family. And Hilda, rich, spoiled, indulged as the recipient of all the luxuries the well-off could afford, had only her beauty and sense of adventure, inevitably sexual, to suggest a way of life." - pp 48-49
"But Gabrielle, Emmanuel's wife, intervened. She took over her grandchild, an act of which Emmanuel heartily approved, and so Nellie lived with them for the most part, as did her father in the late thirties once he had tired of Hilda and his role as husband to a still wildly flirtatious woman. (Peggy Guggenheim was reputed to have insisted that her lovers try all the positions pictured on the walls of some building in Pompeii where women were not allowed to enter but into which Peggy Guggenheim had bribed her way. Whether this is true or not, it was Hilda's boast also." - p 53
"Upon Emmanuel Fox's death, not long after Nellie's departure for the United States, Gabrielle dropped into obscurity. Literary admirers and adorers put up with their wives if they must as part of the price of the noble man's presence. But without the great author, a wife, unless she is literary executor and a tight guarder of the reputation and literary leavings, like the widow of T. S. Eliot, is as unregarded as his merest belongings, more likely, indeed, considered fit only as rummage." - p 54
& here we have one of the most important themes of the bk: a famous writer's wife received no regard except as his appendage - even if she was possibly very important to his writing. No doubt that's been all too true, all too many times - but wdn't it be more generally true to say that the not-famous spouse is.. not famous in contrast to the famous spouse? - regardless of sex? How many of you know who Agatha Christie's husband was? Or Amanda Cross's? Or Charlotte Bronte's? Or George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)'s? Or Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr)'s? Or Shirley Jackson's? Or Ayn Rand's? Surely many of them had supportive husbands. The point is obvious: if one person in a married couple is famous & the other isn't then the other is of little interest to the public in contrast to their famous spouse. &, yet, when I did an online search for "famous women who overshadowed their husbands" I only got results for women artists who were overshadowed by their husbands no matter how I phrased it.
Let's take the example of James Tiptree Jr. Some emphasis has been placed on Tiptree using a man's name, as George Eliot & George Sand did in the 19th century, in order to overcome bias against women writers - &, yet, Tiptree / Sheldon came from a wealthy family w/ an in to the publishing industry thru her mother who was a published safari writer. Tiptree's earliest publishing was w/ of her drawings as a child illustrating one of her mom's bks - how many people have opportunities like that?! There were other women SF writers contemporaneous w/ Tiptree that didn't need to pretend to be men in order to succeed: Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, etc.
For the latter half of Sheldon's life her husband pd the bills while Sheldon devoted her time to writing. She eventually murdered her husband, reputedly as a mercy killing &/or as part of a suicide pact, & then killed herself. Now imagine that situation reversed: a woman works to support her husband's creative endeavors. The husband kills her & then kills himself. Wdn't he be considered by feminists to be an archetype of a male-as-monster? &, yet, I'm a feminist. I think Tiptree / Sheldon's a great writer & I don't consider her a monster.
"I well remember when, many years later, Queenie Leavis, the wife of that most terrifying and influential critic of his time, F. R. Leavis, admitted in an interview years after his death that she had done all the research for his famous books and written the greater part of them." - p 65
I've never heard of Queenie or F. R.. I do note that F. R. wasn't available to defend himself or give an alternative story. Strangely?, in my life, I've also noted that it's quite common for women to lie & for them to be malevolent. Funny how that never seems to enter into feminist mythstory such as the above. The woman is depicted as an unimpeachable source while the man's reputation is besmirched w/o any apparent conscience or qualification about the slander displayed.
"When I finally saw her, when Gabrielle opened the door and stood aside for me to enter, she claimed my attention with a sudden pungency no one, not even Nellie when she arrived in America, not even Dorinda, when I first saw her, had equaled." - p 67
The story that Kate Fansler is to unearth for her commissioned biography is slowly revealed thru the testimony of the people who'd met her subject while she was still alive.
"I had said the right thing. Later I would wonder if those words forced from her were indeed her words, or, like the words of masochistic women in pornographic novels, men's fantasies, really, women saying what men wanted them to say, pretending to feel what men wanted them to feel." - p 73
Ah, more mythstory - not even necessarily feminist. Men are depicted as forcing the narrative of male-female relations in a self-serving direction. From my own experience, masochists, male or female, aren't people I want to be around - the same goes for sadists. Fantasies of masochism in women in my life have originated w/ them. One woman told me I'd be a good "dungeon master", another told me I'd be a good "pimp". Others have wanted to be tied up, others have wanted me to play a role in their rape fantasies, one woman wanted to be strangled during sex. None of these fantasies were mine, none of them were things that I wanted any part of - so why depict such crap as originating w/ men? It seems to me that they originate w/ women AND men. Personally, I'd rather be lovers w/ a woman who's a talented musician, someone I can collaborate w/, someone who enjoys sex for the physical orgasmic pleasure of it - these people who only seem to enjoy sex if there's some sort of dominance dynamic to it are highly unappealing to me - that means that I don't want to dominate their narrative & I don't want them to dominate mine.
Anne has visited Gabrielle where Gabrielle gifts her all her writings - wch may or may not demonstrate the extent of her importance to the writings of her famous husband.
""Take the papers. All of them. I've written it out for the landlady, I wrote it before, I had only to put in your name last night. Don't leave without the papers." She pointed to a sack near her chair; I could see that she had begun packing the papers into it, probably last night. She had overdone it and collapsed." - p 75
The complaints about women's plight continue:
"Gabrielle died some years later. I have continued to pay the rent on the vault in the London bank. I was able to return to my old job in the publishing firm; I was too good to let go, and women could be paid so little then, and given so much responsibility and so little recognition, that the publishers would have been foolish not to take me back." - p 78
One might think, from reading passages like this, that women workers were all slaves & that men were all riding high - but the character's working for a publisher - how hard cd that really be?! In 1978 I was working as a hard-wood floor finisher, that was hard work, I started off at $2 an hr, less than the minimum wage of the time. It was not too uncommon for me to work 12 hr days, w/ a minimum of 3 additional unpd hrs travel time, w/ a 10 minute lunch break & no other breaks. It seems that the author likes to ignore, say, coal miners, an all male profession, in favor of focusing exclusively on the ways women have been exploited. To me, it's not men that's the problem, it's capitalism, it's humanity. If you want to take a hard cold look at exploitation, look at the horrifying González sisters in Mexico.
Amanda Cross's The Players Come Again
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 24, 2022
For my complete review, go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticC...
I often look for writers new to me to read. This search seems most prominent in crime fiction & science fiction but, really, it's across the board in every area. This is the 1st bk I've read by Cross. It's called "A Kate Fansler Mystery" & Cross is advertised on the back cover as the "queen of the American literary whodunit". I don't know what the rest of Cross's work is like but this seemed less like crime fiction, less like a "whodunit" & more like a novel w/ a feminist bone to pick. That, for me, was both its strongest AND its weakest point - strongest b/c that made the work somewhat unique for me as a mystery & weakest b/c the bone being picked was too propagandistic for me & that detracted from my narrative engagement. It begin sw/ a quote from Virginia Woolf:
""The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding. Wander no more, I say; this is the end. The oblong has been set upon the square; the spiral is on top. We have been hauled over the shingle, down to the sea. The players come again."
"—Virginia Woolf,
The Waves" - p -ii
Quoting Woolf is a sort of warning to me of things to come on the propagandistic end of things. When I was in the bkstore business I was very aware of the many volumes of Woolf letters that were available. Woolf was obviously a highly respected writer. I read her Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, & The Voyage Out. I expected to like Orlando the most but remember being disatisfied w/ it.. it seemed to lose narrative force. I enjoyed The Voyage Out the most. I still need to read more by her. At least one person has recommended The Waves to me as the most experimental of her novels.
Saying "warning" in the above paragraph is a bit too heavy-handed. Woolf, Cross, & 'James Tiptree Jr.' (Alice Sheldon) all committed suicide. I'm more or less always saddened by suicides & sympathetic to them enuf to wish they'd been happier. But another thing that they share in common is that they were all wealthy people who complained about the maltreatment of women, themselves included by implication. From my POV they were, instead, very privileged & enjoyed a lifestyle so spoiled that it's hard for me to feel any sympathy for them. I have far more profound sympathy for working class women in prison who got mandatory life sentences w/o parole than I do for someone who feels that they're not reaping the full benefits of what's, nonetheless, a very entitled class position. That sd, I think Sheldon is a great SF writer. I might feel that Cross is a great writer too after reading more by her.
"Kate bethought herself, laughing, of John le Carré, in whose books she delighted. Now, if one could only get John le Carré's British secret service to do the groundwork for a biography. In five days, they could discover all there was to know about a person's past, present, and likely future: they tapped telephones, undertook interviews on phony excuses, learned all a person's haunts, habits, what and where they drank, ate, made love, hung out, and worked. Of course, the subject of the secret service's remarkable endeavors was alive and in a position to spy for England." - p 15
THAT took me by surprise: 1st: a liking for Le Carrés work, something referred to more than once in the novel; 2nd: an uncritical admiration for the surveillance state.
"Tapping telephones, in the end, might give you information, but it did not give you understanding. Kate smiled. Thanks be for the unpredictabilities of human nature. It was not that the likes of Hoover and the British secret service lacked for answers; what they lacked was the right questions.
"Which a biographer might ask? Which she, Kate Fansler, might ask? Kate had a totally indefensible belief in destiny" - pp 15-16
I'd say it's considerably more than a matter of the "right questions" but, instead, a matter of an inflexible sense of duty to oppressive ideological norms as opposed to a liberatory attitude - or "understanding", as Cross expresses it. Fansler, the detective-professor, has the job or writing a biography, not one of discovering the grounds for prosecution or persecution thru surveillance.
"All of Kate's "cases" had called upon, if not exactly needed, her literary skills honed in the world of academic criticism and scholarship. She attracted those cases which called for her particular talents, or which seemed to. That was why she was not, all other more obvious reasons apart, a private investigator rather than a professor of literature." - p 16
That intrigued me. It also helped prompt me to learn more about the author & the degree to wch Fansler is the author's avatar.
"Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (January 13, 1926 – October 9, 2003) was an American academic at Columbia University, the first woman to receive tenure in the English department, and a prolific feminist author of academic studies. In addition, beginning in the 1960s, she published numerous popular mystery novels with a woman protagonist, under the pen name of Amanda Cross." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn...
Cross / Heilbrun's having been "the first woman to receive tenure in the English department" both astonishes me & endears her to me. I don't know when she got her tenure but given that she didn't get her PHD until 1959 I'll speculate that she didn't get tenure until the 1960s. Whatever the case may be I find it truly shameful of academia to've not recognized any woman's teaching talent in the English department before this time. Of course, the discrimination against women participating in higher education wd be a major contributing factor in that. Maybe there were few contenders for such tenure prior to Cross / Heilbrun's time. Such a ridiculous degree of sexism & bigotry seems like an idiocy of the past but it happened in my lifetime. That's truly disgusting.
Fansler's challenge is to write a biography of the wife of a famous male modernist writer, someone felt to've been neglected & overshadowed by her husband's fame.
"I suspect that, as with many declared masterpieces, his novel was ardently read by scholars and skimmed or ignored by those intelligent ones, few enough in every country, who, uninstructed, read books constantly and eagerly. Unlike Virginia Woolf, but like James Joyce or Marcel Proust, he was more of an academic's than a reader's passion. Perhaps he was nearer to Proust than Joyce. Certianly he stood, as I now understand, together with these two and T. S. Eliot, at the center of modernism as it was conceived in academic departments and learned books and articles. Unlike Joyce or Proust, however, his central character was a woman." - p 29
Whew! As a widely read person I find the above to be completely insupportable & sexist - but also more than a bit twisted given the author's actual position as an academic & her protagonist's position as a scholar. Cross essentially criticizes scholars for ardently reading certain bks & separates them from the "intelligent ones" who she claims read other things. I'm NOT an academic, I'm a self-directed reader, & I've read somewhere between 4,000 & 5,000 bks. I've read, as noted above, 3 by Woolf - & just about everything by Joyce. I've had little interest in Proust &, having read a little by Eliot, close to no interest in T. S.. SO where do I fit in her grossly oversimplistic spectrum? I look for originality & complexity in bks & found them more in Joyce's Ulysses & Finnegans Wake than just about anywhere else. IMO, the reason why so few people read those 2 works of Joyce's is b/c they find them too difficult, most people don't seek out difficulty. I seriously doubt, tho, that Woolf is read that much either - both Woolf & Joyce seem more like examples of Modernist writers chosen by academics than they are people preferred by Cross' very hypothetical avid reader. That reader, it seems to me, is more likely to read Harlan Cobin or some-such.
"In the years between the time when Dorinda and I met and the time when Nellie came, books were the chief source of our fantasies and the major topic of conversation. I remember with particular clarity when we read Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, and both dreamed that a filmmaker would decide to make a movie of that novel and cast one of us as Portia, the adolescent heroine." - p 34
I've never heard of Elizabeth Bowen but thanks to the mention of her in Cross's novel I've decided to buy one of her bks. I asked the great oracle for a recommendation & got The Heat of the Day so, tomorrow, I'll get that one (I'd do it now except that today's a "spend nothing" day for me, my 94th this yr). I like the literateness of this bk, it's different from every other mystery I've ever read.
"But the Capehart, which occupied a huge cabinet, had its own special mechanism. Mechanical hands emerged and turned the record. After the record had been played on both sides, the hands flung it to the other end of the cabinet where it landed on a felt-covered slide. Sometimes the Capehart became angry—at the music, at us, at being overworked?—and it would fling the records across the room." - p 40
I'm a sucker for descriptions of unusual recording playback devices. I like to imagine this one playing one of my records: Usic minus the Square Root of Negative One ( https://www.ebay.com/itm/323431803478 ), side 1, perhaps, or Mechanically Repetitive Rerecorded Records RECORD ( https://www.etsy.com/listing/23589117... ), side 2. I like imagining that instead of getting angry the Capehart wd fall in love w/ the record(s) & caress them in ways it's never been seen to do before. If anyone has a working Capehart that they'd like me to make a movie of let me know.
While this bk was copyrighted in 1990, it's written about an earlier era in the same century, an era of much more limited conventional options for women.
"Eleanor and her sister-in-law Hilda, who married Emile Foxx, came from wildly disparate backgrounds and classes, but they were alike in being denied a chance even to go to college, much less to prepare for a career not emphatically female. So Eleanor had the choice of training to be a nurse, a schoolteacher, or a secretary, and chose the latter because she had had enough of nursing and children as the oldest in her large family. And Hilda, rich, spoiled, indulged as the recipient of all the luxuries the well-off could afford, had only her beauty and sense of adventure, inevitably sexual, to suggest a way of life." - pp 48-49
"But Gabrielle, Emmanuel's wife, intervened. She took over her grandchild, an act of which Emmanuel heartily approved, and so Nellie lived with them for the most part, as did her father in the late thirties once he had tired of Hilda and his role as husband to a still wildly flirtatious woman. (Peggy Guggenheim was reputed to have insisted that her lovers try all the positions pictured on the walls of some building in Pompeii where women were not allowed to enter but into which Peggy Guggenheim had bribed her way. Whether this is true or not, it was Hilda's boast also." - p 53
"Upon Emmanuel Fox's death, not long after Nellie's departure for the United States, Gabrielle dropped into obscurity. Literary admirers and adorers put up with their wives if they must as part of the price of the noble man's presence. But without the great author, a wife, unless she is literary executor and a tight guarder of the reputation and literary leavings, like the widow of T. S. Eliot, is as unregarded as his merest belongings, more likely, indeed, considered fit only as rummage." - p 54
& here we have one of the most important themes of the bk: a famous writer's wife received no regard except as his appendage - even if she was possibly very important to his writing. No doubt that's been all too true, all too many times - but wdn't it be more generally true to say that the not-famous spouse is.. not famous in contrast to the famous spouse? - regardless of sex? How many of you know who Agatha Christie's husband was? Or Amanda Cross's? Or Charlotte Bronte's? Or George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)'s? Or Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr)'s? Or Shirley Jackson's? Or Ayn Rand's? Surely many of them had supportive husbands. The point is obvious: if one person in a married couple is famous & the other isn't then the other is of little interest to the public in contrast to their famous spouse. &, yet, when I did an online search for "famous women who overshadowed their husbands" I only got results for women artists who were overshadowed by their husbands no matter how I phrased it.
Let's take the example of James Tiptree Jr. Some emphasis has been placed on Tiptree using a man's name, as George Eliot & George Sand did in the 19th century, in order to overcome bias against women writers - &, yet, Tiptree / Sheldon came from a wealthy family w/ an in to the publishing industry thru her mother who was a published safari writer. Tiptree's earliest publishing was w/ of her drawings as a child illustrating one of her mom's bks - how many people have opportunities like that?! There were other women SF writers contemporaneous w/ Tiptree that didn't need to pretend to be men in order to succeed: Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, etc.
For the latter half of Sheldon's life her husband pd the bills while Sheldon devoted her time to writing. She eventually murdered her husband, reputedly as a mercy killing &/or as part of a suicide pact, & then killed herself. Now imagine that situation reversed: a woman works to support her husband's creative endeavors. The husband kills her & then kills himself. Wdn't he be considered by feminists to be an archetype of a male-as-monster? &, yet, I'm a feminist. I think Tiptree / Sheldon's a great writer & I don't consider her a monster.
"I well remember when, many years later, Queenie Leavis, the wife of that most terrifying and influential critic of his time, F. R. Leavis, admitted in an interview years after his death that she had done all the research for his famous books and written the greater part of them." - p 65
I've never heard of Queenie or F. R.. I do note that F. R. wasn't available to defend himself or give an alternative story. Strangely?, in my life, I've also noted that it's quite common for women to lie & for them to be malevolent. Funny how that never seems to enter into feminist mythstory such as the above. The woman is depicted as an unimpeachable source while the man's reputation is besmirched w/o any apparent conscience or qualification about the slander displayed.
"When I finally saw her, when Gabrielle opened the door and stood aside for me to enter, she claimed my attention with a sudden pungency no one, not even Nellie when she arrived in America, not even Dorinda, when I first saw her, had equaled." - p 67
The story that Kate Fansler is to unearth for her commissioned biography is slowly revealed thru the testimony of the people who'd met her subject while she was still alive.
"I had said the right thing. Later I would wonder if those words forced from her were indeed her words, or, like the words of masochistic women in pornographic novels, men's fantasies, really, women saying what men wanted them to say, pretending to feel what men wanted them to feel." - p 73
Ah, more mythstory - not even necessarily feminist. Men are depicted as forcing the narrative of male-female relations in a self-serving direction. From my own experience, masochists, male or female, aren't people I want to be around - the same goes for sadists. Fantasies of masochism in women in my life have originated w/ them. One woman told me I'd be a good "dungeon master", another told me I'd be a good "pimp". Others have wanted to be tied up, others have wanted me to play a role in their rape fantasies, one woman wanted to be strangled during sex. None of these fantasies were mine, none of them were things that I wanted any part of - so why depict such crap as originating w/ men? It seems to me that they originate w/ women AND men. Personally, I'd rather be lovers w/ a woman who's a talented musician, someone I can collaborate w/, someone who enjoys sex for the physical orgasmic pleasure of it - these people who only seem to enjoy sex if there's some sort of dominance dynamic to it are highly unappealing to me - that means that I don't want to dominate their narrative & I don't want them to dominate mine.
Anne has visited Gabrielle where Gabrielle gifts her all her writings - wch may or may not demonstrate the extent of her importance to the writings of her famous husband.
""Take the papers. All of them. I've written it out for the landlady, I wrote it before, I had only to put in your name last night. Don't leave without the papers." She pointed to a sack near her chair; I could see that she had begun packing the papers into it, probably last night. She had overdone it and collapsed." - p 75
The complaints about women's plight continue:
"Gabrielle died some years later. I have continued to pay the rent on the vault in the London bank. I was able to return to my old job in the publishing firm; I was too good to let go, and women could be paid so little then, and given so much responsibility and so little recognition, that the publishers would have been foolish not to take me back." - p 78
One might think, from reading passages like this, that women workers were all slaves & that men were all riding high - but the character's working for a publisher - how hard cd that really be?! In 1978 I was working as a hard-wood floor finisher, that was hard work, I started off at $2 an hr, less than the minimum wage of the time. It was not too uncommon for me to work 12 hr days, w/ a minimum of 3 additional unpd hrs travel time, w/ a 10 minute lunch break & no other breaks. It seems that the author likes to ignore, say, coal miners, an all male profession, in favor of focusing exclusively on the ways women have been exploited. To me, it's not men that's the problem, it's capitalism, it's humanity. If you want to take a hard cold look at exploitation, look at the horrifying González sisters in Mexico.
May 8, 2014
I would have liked this more if it had not attempted to be genre, and if Cross was not so - limited - in her understanding of other people, or at least in her ability to write about them. I am finding these books more and more frustrating; they really are not bad but they are small and narrow, and it annoys me that she does not ever leap over her own walls. Yet I keep reading them, stubbornly, not like the truly terrible Antonia Fraser gothics, but with a sort of desire to break through the code and understand the mind of the author. Perhaps I should just go read her academic non-fiction and be done with it, but I think I will finish the Fansler novels so that I see the whole sweep of them, and then put them away never to be reread. It is more than curiosity, but I am not sure what the more is.
January 8, 2012
A Kate Fansler mystery. I've read one other book in this series, many years ago, and remember being a bit disappointed by it. But I wanted to give the author (Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of feminist literary critic Carolyn Heilbrun) another chance. Sad to say, this book was even less satisfying than the first. I read it right through, fairly quickly (for me), waiting for the promised mystery to develop. But, except for a possible long-ago murder mentioned in the book's last pages, this was a pretty standard tale of literary research.
The book did have a number of interesting characters, several of them older women -- a very unusual and welcome occurrence. But the dialogue was disturbingly unrealistic and pretentious, even for academic and literary types. Every time someone opens his or her mouth, a literary reference or quote pops out.
Altogether, I'd say this is not really one I'd recommend. Not exactly boring, just disappointing if you're looking for real suspense.
The book did have a number of interesting characters, several of them older women -- a very unusual and welcome occurrence. But the dialogue was disturbingly unrealistic and pretentious, even for academic and literary types. Every time someone opens his or her mouth, a literary reference or quote pops out.
Altogether, I'd say this is not really one I'd recommend. Not exactly boring, just disappointing if you're looking for real suspense.
April 5, 2021
Perhaps the secret was shocking to Kate or to the readers of 1990 but, 30 years on, it wasn't a real surprise to me. Even so, I particularly enjoyed this book for the same reason I have enjoyed the others-- the literary discussions, the feminism, the writing. It was less light hearted throughout but still engaging.
March 15, 2017
This is one of my favorites by a favorite author! The mysteries of the characters, their depth and intelligence, were utterly engaging. That being said, I am not one of those who require a body in order for something to be a mystery. Some may not find it the sort of mystery they expect.
July 18, 2022
Kate Fansler is at a bit of a loose end having just published her more recent academic work, so when a publisher invites her to lunch in order to pitch a new investigative job to her, she is intrigued. Particularly so once she learns that the publisher wants her to delve into the life of the wife of a Great Author of the modernist period, a man who achieved high acclaim by centering a novel on the interior life of a woman, who most people suppose was modeled on the wife. As she begins to contemplate the work, Kate is eager to meet and talk with three women whose lives were all intertwined with the Foxx family, but they all have secrets of their own to keep…. I’ve been reading the Kate Fansler mysteries a bit at a time, sometimes feeling exasperated with the character and sometimes cheering her on. This, the 10th (of, I think, 14 in total) in the series is actually far and away my favourite so far, largely because Kate meets her match in the three women she encounters and so her tendency toward archness is sharply curbed. I also liked the second part of the novel, which is in the form of a memoir of one of the three women and which is completely different from the usual tone in these books. I don’t know that it’s necessary to have read the earlier books in the series, but certainly a basic knowledge of the myth of Ariadne and Theseus is helpful; very highly recommended!
August 15, 2020
Don't read this thinking it's going to be a formulaic detective story. It's a literary mystery, with much in the development of character through conversation and literary quotations and allusions. The central question concerns the biography Kate Fansler is asked to write of the wife of a (fictional) top figure in literary modernism, a writer contemporary with and of the stature of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or T.S. Eliot. What was the truth of Gabrielle Foxx's life? That is the mystery Kate sets out to unravel through reading a memoir and conducting interviews of three women now in their sixties who were younger members in the family circle. The revelations are interesting, especially as the relationships reveal something of Gabrielle herself; the final surprise is something Kate commits never to reveal, and the wonderful and logical progress of her decision is a delight in and of itself. Along the way I hugely enjoyed discursions into myth, marriage, patriarchy, aging, feminism, fatherhood, knowing what one "should" do, detection, literary analysis, rebellion & conformity, and keeping secrets.
December 9, 2020
This is a rather strange one - no murders to investigate. A publisher has asked Kate to write a biography of Gabrielle Foxx, the wife of a famous author. In the process of her research, we meet three very interesting women who have been friends since childhood - one of whom is the granddaughter of the famous author - and learn a lot about their youth. One of the women was given a lot of Gabrielle's papers and has stored them unread in a bank for years. Since all of Gabrielle's letters were burned after her death, Kate is anxious to see the papers, and what she finds changes her mind about doing the biography; there are so many secrets coming out, some of which she can never reveal. She and the three women have a better idea of what to do, if she can talk her publisher into it. This is quite a bit different from the other books so far, but I found it fascinating.
I still haven't been able to figure out what the title has to do with the story - very frustrating!
I still haven't been able to figure out what the title has to do with the story - very frustrating!
November 27, 2024
I read this concurrently with Amanda July's "All Fours" and they paired well. July is focused on someone in perimenopause exploring what her post-menopause life will be like. In this book, cloaked in genre mystery fiction and academic intrigue, the story is about the after: the renaissance experienced by three women in their 60s.
The book is also a take down of Great Authors of Modernism and their misogyny.
I like the Kate Fansler mysteries in part because they remind me of the cozy, specific, and often pretentious world of the Madeline L'Engle books I devoured as a child. If you don't like rambly, wordy New Yorkers who drink a lot, this might not be for you. There is an added allure to the series because the author operated pseudonymously, covering up the fact that she was actually a literary professor at Columbia. Lit professors moonlighting as paperback mystery writers? The horror!
The book is also a take down of Great Authors of Modernism and their misogyny.
I like the Kate Fansler mysteries in part because they remind me of the cozy, specific, and often pretentious world of the Madeline L'Engle books I devoured as a child. If you don't like rambly, wordy New Yorkers who drink a lot, this might not be for you. There is an added allure to the series because the author operated pseudonymously, covering up the fact that she was actually a literary professor at Columbia. Lit professors moonlighting as paperback mystery writers? The horror!
August 6, 2024
I’ve had this book for years and never gotten round to reading it so it is just a serendipitous coincidence that I picked it up as I’ve been rereading Greek myths, many of them retelling the female characters’ points of view. I was expecting a murder mystery (the book says ‘A Kate Fansler Mystery’ but it was more of a literary research project, where Kate goes from character to character being fed information in small chunks, at the speed the other characters want her to hear. - this was its only weakness really, she didn’t actually work anything out (ignoring the ending ‘revelation’). It was an interesting read tho and I will definitely be looking for more of her books.
July 31, 2024
Another old series. Will look for more as the main character is a professor of English Lit who has a knack for solving problems. Murder or such from the info on previous stories. Here she is tasked with writing a biography of the wife of a famous author. Her informants all lead her to bits and pieces of the life of the lady but they have another agenda. In the end our professor learns that it is another book she must prepare and it is a good hunt for all the bits and pieces of this tale that will make this a good read.
March 22, 2018
What even is this? Is it a mystery? Is it a literarybiography world thriller? I'm so confused. It was interesting, but in the end unfulfilling, despite the fact that I liked several of the major characters... some of the plot twists strained by suspension of disbelief even more than usual.
Still, if the premise amuses you, the book probably will be worth toying with, like a light omelette.
Still, if the premise amuses you, the book probably will be worth toying with, like a light omelette.
October 12, 2018
Two stars for interesting-enough description.
No stars for a long information-dump. I don't require action stories, but I do need something to happen. The story has to move forward.
I made it to the 60s pages, but found I was reading the first sentence of each paragraph and then skipping to the next one waiting for story development. I never reached that point. Upside is, it's from the library.
No stars for a long information-dump. I don't require action stories, but I do need something to happen. The story has to move forward.
I made it to the 60s pages, but found I was reading the first sentence of each paragraph and then skipping to the next one waiting for story development. I never reached that point. Upside is, it's from the library.
March 24, 2019
Professor and amateur detective Kate Fansler is approached by a publishing company to write the biography of the wife of a famous modernist author. This was not really a mystery but a look at literary criticism, family, and female bonds with a bit of intrigue thrown in. I thought it was well written and interesting but can see why there are such differing opinions here.
August 22, 2022
In researching a contracted biography on the wife of an acclaimed modernist writer while on academic leave, Columbia Literature Professor/amateur sleuth Kate Fansler unearths the secrets protected by 3 generations of women from author Emmanuel Foxx's family--including incest & murder.
September 16, 2017
Apparently I read this years ago. It doesn't bear a second read. Boring, talky, and doesn't reach any kind of tension. Meh. Only got halfway through and abandoned it.
March 19, 2020
I gave up by the second chapter. Too many characters. I was lost in the first chapter.
October 19, 2020
The literary allusions and character descriptions are very good but the story is disappointing as a mystery. The ending seems contrived in order to qualify the book as a mystery
May 14, 2017
Kate Fansler feels sometimes like the person you would love to be: witty, acerbic, nearly always all knowing, but sometimes I want to stuff her in a box. Really. Sometimes her know-it-all-ways is enough to send over the deep end. And why in heck can't we learn a little more about her husband — whose name escapes me — a lawyer who we rarely hear from or see.
In this story, which doesn't really feel like a mystery at all, the literature professor (who never seems to teach or conduct research — why is she still hired anyplace?) is offered the possibility of writing a biography about the wife of a famous author, and apparently the muse for his historic book, a modernist take on the Greek classic tale of Ariadne, a daughter of King Minos who helped Theseus in his quest to slay the Minotaur and then fled with him aboard a ship only to be abandoned on a island.
Then there is the other story, of three women who in their youth came together: one whose family was rich, one who came from an impoverished background and the third, the granddaughter of the famous author. It is to them that Kate turns when she takes on the writing challenge and quickly she find herself being managed. There is sort of a mystery — why Kate is being manipulated as she is, what's the real story that is being hidden — but its almost glossed over by the witty conversations all four women have about and with each other. Really, that is what most of the book is about. Only at the very end, nearly the very very end, does some of the families dark secrets come out.
Sorry, I've waited a while to write how I feel about this story. It was quick reading and the conversations were witty, intelligent and the classic references almost over my head (really in 1990, were high school students still reading Greek mythology? I didn't.) but Kate hasn't grown on me and I wasn't driven to really understand what all the 'mystery' was about. I would have liked to learn more about the author's wife, but sadly, she felt like creature in the closet — you know its there but you have no clue if its an elephant, a monster or a mouse. As with earlier Amanda Cross books, I don't know how Falser comes to the conclusions she does and the ending seems to be slapped in haphazardly.
In this story, which doesn't really feel like a mystery at all, the literature professor (who never seems to teach or conduct research — why is she still hired anyplace?) is offered the possibility of writing a biography about the wife of a famous author, and apparently the muse for his historic book, a modernist take on the Greek classic tale of Ariadne, a daughter of King Minos who helped Theseus in his quest to slay the Minotaur and then fled with him aboard a ship only to be abandoned on a island.
Then there is the other story, of three women who in their youth came together: one whose family was rich, one who came from an impoverished background and the third, the granddaughter of the famous author. It is to them that Kate turns when she takes on the writing challenge and quickly she find herself being managed. There is sort of a mystery — why Kate is being manipulated as she is, what's the real story that is being hidden — but its almost glossed over by the witty conversations all four women have about and with each other. Really, that is what most of the book is about. Only at the very end, nearly the very very end, does some of the families dark secrets come out.
Sorry, I've waited a while to write how I feel about this story. It was quick reading and the conversations were witty, intelligent and the classic references almost over my head (really in 1990, were high school students still reading Greek mythology? I didn't.) but Kate hasn't grown on me and I wasn't driven to really understand what all the 'mystery' was about. I would have liked to learn more about the author's wife, but sadly, she felt like creature in the closet — you know its there but you have no clue if its an elephant, a monster or a mouse. As with earlier Amanda Cross books, I don't know how Falser comes to the conclusions she does and the ending seems to be slapped in haphazardly.
September 13, 2023
I went into this story expecting a mystery, and found some kind of fictional biography instead. That I surprisingly really liked. I usually am not a the biggest fan of biographies, since I always feel like they are boring, but the way this book was written I was actually pretty okay with it. It was easy and fast to read most of the time and I did like it. The mystery comes up way too late for it to be an actual mystery, so I would say calling it a mystery is false advertisement, but as a non-mystery I did like it.
June 27, 2012
I really liked this book for the development of the female characters and the intertwining character plots. I hadn't read any Amanda Cross books before and didn't pick it up because I thought it'd be a Mystery/detective novel. I'd say it's a good novel but not a good mystery. A Heads up: reading through the long part that is Anne's memoir is really dull - skim it and get on with the rest of the book. There is probably important info in it, but it was too slow to bother with. That said, I really enjoyed everything AFT that part, thought the development & ending were really sharp & interesting. My disappointment? That the book written by Gabrielle does not in fact exist (I assume)- I'd love to read it.
January 16, 2008
This is the third of the three books I think represent the best of Amanda that I decided to re-read recently. It brings together themes of feminism, literature, relationships and aging with a mystery format. I especially like the portrayals of Ann, Dorinda and Nellie. Through conversations and a journal the lives and relationships of the three from childhood to their 60s. They are indeed the three witches (in a very good sense).
October 22, 2013
Kate Fansler is asked to write the biography of the wife of one of the 20th century’s greatest novelists, but the family members and friends only allow her to gradually uncover the family’s secrets.
Different than Kate’s usual investigations, this is much less a mystery than a gradual unfolding of the story. Interesting story, but unsatisfying if one is looking for a mystery. A good read and recommended more as a story or novel than a mystery.
Different than Kate’s usual investigations, this is much less a mystery than a gradual unfolding of the story. Interesting story, but unsatisfying if one is looking for a mystery. A good read and recommended more as a story or novel than a mystery.
July 5, 2015
I read most of Amanda Cross' Kate Fansler series as they were published up until the late 1990's. In my opinion they were beautifully written and the literary information given and the mystery offered were terrific. I recently purchased The Players Come Again and The Edge of Doom book in a second hand shop and I am glad I did. The reading of these two books was like finding old friends. They are both worth reading.
March 4, 2015
I gave up on page 15. I checked to see that I have attempted one other book by this author and disliked it as well. I can't imagine why I bothered to keep this on my bedroom shelf for so long. I am not willing to wade any further into this stilted prose and flimsy puzzle. Into the donation bin it goes.
March 20, 2011
A lot of effort with little payoff. If Emile was central to the plot, why didn't we learn more about him throughout? I just couldn't rouse much sympathy for any of the characters and the "mystery" was weak. Ho, hum . . . won't be back for another Amanda.
April 16, 2012
I picked this book up because I had always enjoyed Amanda Cross and her early works but couldn't really remember this one. NowI'm torn on how to rate this book; it's an interesting story but not really what I would consider a mystery.
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