Series Debut
Harriet Stone is named for Harriet Tubman – the legendary Tubman had saved her father from slavery (he referred to her as “the General”). Our Harriet is intrepid and courageous, though she herself may not quite be aware of it. Set in 1926, she’s has lost most of her family as well as her fiancée to the Spanish flu, and she’s in charge of the orphaned Lovey, who is not quite young enough to be her daughter and not quite old enough to be her sister. Their relationship teeters between the two designations.
Out of the blue (and at the end of her rope) Harriet gets a letter from a cousin she’s never heard of, Junetta Plum, who offers her a room in her boarding house, telling her “I board single women trying to make a way in this hard old world.” So Harriet and Lovey set off from Connecticut to Harlem, where, Junetta informs her. “now is the time to come. Everything is new and beginning, yet nothing is ever as it seems.”
When the exhausted Harriet and Lovey arrive, Junetta greets them at the train station, and once home in Harlem, offers them a tiny room in the attic for their first night, telling them she will change them to a better room the next day. For Junetta, that next day never comes, as she’s discovered dead in the morning, apparently stabbed.
Harriet discovers the house is now hers, and with that inheritance comes both responsibility, resentments, boarders, a hostile cook and housekeeper, as well as neighbors and others who were in Junetta’s life. While Junetta leaves the canvas of the novel so soon, it’s her personality and Harriet’s attempt to find out more about her that guides the novel. Junetta is as much a character as Harriet.
Lovey and the cook, Tulip, quickly form a bond, with Tulip making her cookies. Tulip, however, is suspicious and resentful of Harriet, a cousin she’d never seen or heard of, and while the relationship between the two women moving forward remains to be figured out, so does the situation with the boarders, who make the big Victorian house in Harlem affordable. Luckily there are also allies on Harriet’s side – one is an African American cop, Hoyt, who comes to the scene of Junetta’s death, and there’s also a neighbor couple. The husband is a lawyer who helps Harriet through some of the legal necessities after a death, and the wife, Theo, takes Lovey under her wing.
This is a slice of time and a location I knew very little about before opening this book, and Wilson’s gift is to immerse the reader in a fully realized and lived location, one that feels completely authentic. She’s also a bit of a genius with character and the situations in the book make the characters more fully realized, drawing emotion from the reader. I enjoyed getting to know Harriet as she parses the circumstances of both Junetta’s life and death. She is fearless and intelligent, and when she realizes this fact, she sets her mind to solving the crime, which the police are content to dismiss as a suicide.
This is a densely populated book though the characters are all memorable, and the plot is never confusing. Some writers don’t handle secondary characters well, not fleshing them out adequately, but Wesley brings her touch to every person she writes about, to the great advantage of this novel. At the end I felt I had been immersed in 1926 Harlem, and I loved getting to know the brave and bold Harriet. — Robin Agnew