Debut
This is a perfectly charming novel with enough quirky characters to make it a standout debut. Roughly following the “Thursday Murder Club” scenario in which retirees in a closed community solve crimes, it features widower Harry Lancaster, who has recently suffered a hip injury. He’s forced to temporarily hire a younger in-home caregiver, Emma, who, having burned out on critical care nursing, sees helping people like Harry as her next step. The setting is a small community of mostly retirees, and, with many hours to kill, Harry spends many of them looking out his large front window at the comings and goings in the neighborhood.
One day he gets a call from his neighbor Sue, who asks him to call 911 and utters the word “poison” before the line goes dead. He and Emma race over to Sue’s only to find her close to death on her kitchen floor. When she passes shortly thereafter, the police rule it an accident, but, unconvinced, the two of them pursue their own investigation, with Harry’s sketchy neighbors and plenty of suspicious local activities providing more than enough fuel to keep the sleuthing humming.
The introduction of the nicely varied group of neighbors serves also to introduce and deepen their personalities and traits, every single one becoming vivid to the reader, no small accomplishment with such a large cast. We get to know the churchgoer, the Indian couple who worked in tech, the chef/artist, the philanderer, and the inappropriate couple. The only thing they have in common is that none of them seemed to have liked Sue, who evidently had her nose in everyone’s business, and not in a good way.
When there’s another shooting the detective in charge begins to take Harry and Emma’s observations more a little more seriously, though he still begs them to butt out. It is no spoiler to say that they do not, but rather bring their own expertise to the table with even more enthusiasm. Emma is, of course, a trained nurse and Harry, a retired anthropologist who has worked with USAID and whose connections in Washington come in handy during their investigation, with the deep background he’s able to obtain pushing the case ahead.
Newbie author Cullen makes good use of traditional detective tropes including red herring(s) and pulls a good surprise ending out of her bag of tricks. Harry and Emma are also fleshed out as characters, managing to bring out the best in each other. Harry still mourns his recently deceased wife of 50 years but is beginning to think he should use the time he has left more constructively, while Emma is bound to an engagement she’s not so sure of.
This book brought to mind my first delighted reading of Charlotte MacLeod’s classic Rest You Merry, featuring my very favorite kind of sleuth, amateurs who utilize their own unique expertise to solve the case. Like MacLeod, Cullen seems to have a winning, gently humorous manner of telling a compelling story. This is a very strong first outing and I look forward to a long lived series, and happily a sequel entitled A Field Guide to Death and Deceit is scheduled for September. — Robin Agnew