Lori Rader-Day

Lori Rader-Day: Death at Greenway

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The most towering figure in mystery fiction is Agatha Christie.  She created and influenced countless plots and tropes, and invented iconic detectives.  Surely no mystery writer can set a pen to paper without feeling in her debt.  Re-paying this debt with her impressionistic Death at Greenway is Lori Rader-Day, a writer known for multiple point of view novels and indirect storytelling.  Her style could not be further from Agatha’s, but – there’s still that debt to be paid.

The book is set during WWII at Mrs. Christie’s summer home, Greenway, in Devon.  During the war the Mallowans (for that was Agatha’s married name) lent their house to a war nursery – or to children evacuated from London, cared for by nurses.  Rader-Day has chosen to focus her story on Bridget Kelly, a failed nurse in training, who takes up the war nursery job out of desperation. read more

Lori Rader-Day: The Lucky One

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The Lucky One follows the stories of Alice Fine, who as a child emerged unscathed from a kidnapping, and Merrily Cruz, who wants badly to find her missing father – or the closest approximation to a father that she’s known.  Rader-Day, in her typical fashion, fleshes out these women’s stories with psychological background to each character, building and building them, until the two women practically become real.

Alice’s obsession with her kidnapping leads her to a website called The Doe Pages, where people are searching for the lost.  She’s drawn to it and she also thinks maybe she can find her kidnapper there.  Her life is a little shut off – she’s broken up with her fiancée and she lives alone.  She works in the office of the family construction company, with her father and uncle as benevolent bosses.  The women on the Doe Pages, strangers, become acquaintances, then friends. read more