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I read many, many, mysteries, in the neighborhood of two a week, enjoying many of them and loving fewer. When I pick up a novel like this one by Emily Littlejohn, I am forcibly and joyfully reminded of the reasons I love this genre so much. This is simply a wonderful mystery, and even better, it reminded me of another series by another favorite writer of mine, Julia Spencer-Fleming.<\/p>\n
Littlejohn\u2019s novel is set in a little Colorado town\u2014one that\u2019s on the \u201cB\u201d ski resort list (unlike the \u201cA\u201d list Vail or Aspen), and happy with that status. The setting, as in Spencer-Fleming\u2019s novels set in upstate New York, is practically a character, as Detective Gemma Monroe drives along the treacherous mountain roads, hemmed in by trees and snow.<\/p>\n
Gemma is just back from maternity leave when she and her partner (she\u2019s on the graveyard shift) get called out to the local private school on a suspicious prowler call. The Valley Academy, remote and gated, requires the two cops to split up in a raging blizzard and look for anything out of place on the quiet campus. They find something: a dead man, stabbed in the gut, out in a blizzard with no coat. He turns out to be a famous author who has been teaching a few classes at the academy incognito.<\/p>\n
Preserving the crime scene as much as possible in a blizzard, the two find a note stuffed in the dead man\u2019s mouth: \u201cThis is only the beginning.\u201d They think they may be looking for a serial killer. As they begin to unravel the man\u2019s life, they get drawn into the culture of the school where other things seem to be happening, one of them a form of bullying so cruel and so sneaky that the kids affected are completely traumatized by it.<\/p>\n
The underlying theme seems to be fairy tales\u2014the bully at the school is known as \u201cGrimm\u201d and the cottage where the dead man\u2019s best friend lives seems like a witch\u2019s stone house at the edge of the forest. Gemma even encounters a local construction guy, who may have mob ties, quoting Yeats\u2019 poem The Stolen Child<\/em> to her while she\u2019s at lunch:<\/p>\n Come away, O human child! While this all sounds creepily fey, Littlejohn has grounded her clever mystery in the details of ordinary life. While Gemma is delighted to be back at work, she still misses and loves her baby, and her boss has set aside a room for her to pump breast milk. I can\u2019t imagine another genre of writing where such a telling detail of a woman\u2019s life would be included, and that\u2019s just another reason I love mystery novels. They tend to illuminate woman\u2019s lives incredibly well.<\/p>\n Along with fairy tales, Gemma is herself struggling with what it means to be a grown up, embracing what\u2019s beautiful in life along with the other parts of life that aren\u2019t so lovely: distrust, fear, aging relatives, murder. It gives the book a real heft.<\/p>\n With the rich array of believable and interesting, fleshed out characters, a memorable setting, a clever mystery, and an underlying theme that adds a creepy intensity to the whole novel, this book and this new series is a real stand out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read many, many, mysteries, in the neighborhood of two a week, enjoying many of them and loving fewer. When I pick up a novel like this one by Emily Littlejohn, I am forcibly and joyfully reminded of the reasons I love this genre so much. This is simply a wonderful mystery, and even better, … 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-2454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454","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=2454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2456,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions\/2456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>To the waters and the wild
\n<\/em>With a faery, hand in hand,
\n<\/em>For the world\u2019s more full of weeping than you can understand<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n