{"id":2422,"date":"2017-10-28T20:05:19","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T03:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=2422"},"modified":"2017-10-28T20:05:19","modified_gmt":"2017-10-29T03:05:19","slug":"carrie-smith-unholy-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/carrie-smith-unholy-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Carrie Smith: Unholy City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"With her clear prose and careful gaze, Carrie Smith has quickly become one of my favorite authors. British or American, I love a police procedural, and some of my favorite authors of all time include Lillian O\u2019Donnell, Leslie Glass, Barbara D\u2019Amato, Lynn Hightower and Lee Martin, all authors of the American police procedural. These writers feature a female cop as the central protagonist and from O\u2019Donnell on forward, all have encountered, in their different ways, varieties of sexism and discrimination. Unfortunately, the history line beginning with O\u2019Donnell\u2019s The Phone Calls<\/em> in 1972 to Carrie Smith\u2019s 2017 Unholy City<\/em> hasn\u2019t changed all that radically.<\/p>\n

Claire Codella, Smith\u2019s main character, is a cancer survivor who is given crap assignments by her boss through a combination of jealousy (she made a name for herself with her first big case) and a tendency to think she\u2019s too \u201cweak\u201d to do her job, thanks to her illness. While the details of Codella\u2019s work environment and relationships give the books a welcome heft, they are not the main attraction. As with all the other writers mentioned, the story is the thing, and Smith is a top-notch storyteller.<\/p>\n

With each novel she\u2019s taken a look inside different pockets of Manhattan \u2013 schools, the theater, ritzy old age homes \u2013 in this novel she tackles the church, in the form of a venerable old Episcopalian outpost, St. Paul\u2019s, complete with its own crematorium, graveyard and back garden. Into every garden, unfortunately, a little rain must fall and in this novel it takes the form of the corpse of one of the parishioners. The body of one of the more outspoken vestry members is found by another parishioner after a vestry meeting, and all hell breaks loose, in the most Episcopalian sense of the word.<\/p>\n

Good Episcopalians all, the members of the vestry and even the rector herself are hiding or holding things inside, which unfortunately, results in a spate of deaths. Because of the set-up Smith has created\u00a0more or less a locked room murder, as the only people who could have done it were all at the vestry meeting or connected to the church in some way. A group of homeless men sleeping at the church for the night are quickly ruled out, and it\u2019s up to Codella and her boyfriend Heggerty (the lead on the case) to sort things out. Smith is a brisk and clear storyteller but she also has a good grasp of character and a deft hand at portraying it. This is a very enjoyable read, both as a police novel and <\/em>as a detective novel. I continue to look forward to whatever Smith comes up with next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With her clear prose and careful gaze, Carrie Smith has quickly become one of my favorite authors. British or American, I love a police procedural, and some of my favorite authors of all time include Lillian O\u2019Donnell, Leslie Glass, Barbara D\u2019Amato, Lynn Hightower and Lee Martin, all authors of the American police procedural. These writers … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-2422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2424,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions\/2424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}