{"id":3782,"date":"2020-08-28T06:13:24","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T13:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3782"},"modified":"2020-08-28T06:13:24","modified_gmt":"2020-08-28T13:13:24","slug":"ellen-hart-in-a-midnight-wood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/ellen-hart-in-a-midnight-wood\/","title":{"rendered":"Ellen Hart: In a Midnight Wood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Ellen Hart knocks another one out of the park.\u00a0 I continue with my mantra: if you love traditional detective fiction, few writers are doing it better than Ellen Hart at the moment.\u00a0 The air is sucked out of the room by some of the writers of traditional fiction set in England (Ann Cleeves, Deborah Crombie) or Canada (Louise Penny), but make no mistake, Ellen Hart is treading the same ground.\u00a0 She\u2019s just doing it in Minnesota instead of London or Montreal.\u00a0 As much as I love Cleeves, Crombie and Penny, I love Hart every bit as much, and with 27 books in her Jane Lawless series (and counting) there\u2019s plenty to embrace.<\/p>\n

Jane Lawless, for the uninitiated, is a gay restaurant owner in Minneapolis, lives alone with her dogs, and has had various relationships through the series, none of them ending particularly well.\u00a0 She has a comic foil, the flamboyant Cordelia Thorn, who balances Jane\u2019s sensible practicality with theatrical flair and drama.\u00a0 In this book, Jane and Cordelia have travelled to the small Minnesota town of Castle Lake, where they are taking part in a fundraising auction.<\/p>\n

They are staying with their friend Emma Granholm who is planning her class reunion, a situation ripe with possibility as far as dragging skeletons out of any long ago closets are concerned.\u00a0 When the body of a missing local man is discovered under a grave that\u2019s being disinterred, all the skeletons begin to come home to roost.<\/p>\n

Like every good writer of traditional mystery fiction, Hart provides the reader with a large and distinct cast.\u00a0 While of course they provide the suspects for the crime, they are also all fully realized humans who make the atmosphere in any Hart novel a rich and dense one, this one being no exception. Because Jane is out of town and out of her element (she does have a P.I. license) she\u2019s functioning in this novel in her new iteration, that of a true crime podcaster.\u00a0 It\u2019s a perfect in, allowing her to believably interview suspects and eventually get to the heart of the matter.<\/p>\n

Unlike the other authors I\u2019ve mentioned, Hart\u2019s main character is an amateur, not a policewoman\/man.\u00a0 That may be what has slightly marginalized these books as not worthy of serious attention, but Hart has given Jane a P.I. license and the introduction of the podcasting element is a smart one.\u00a0 Nothing is trendier at the moment than true crime podcasts.\u00a0 And the writing couldn\u2019t be more brilliant.<\/p>\n

Hart\u2019s plots are complex, her characters are interesting and complicated, and Jane is incredibly relatable and appealing.\u00a0 I guess there are two schools of thought as far as Cordelia goes, but I think she\u2019s hilarious, and Jane\u2019s deadpan response to some of her behaviors just makes them all the funnier.\u00a0 This was an excellent story on top of everything else.\u00a0 While I wasn\u2019t totally surprised by the perpetrator, part of the reason for that is Hart\u2019s careful set up of events, and part of it is the fact that Hart also writes suspense novels.\u00a0 Sometimes how<\/em> a crime was committed is as important as whodunnit, which is a suspense\/psychological element.<\/p>\n

Pick this one up or pick up the first novel in the series (Hallowed Murder<\/em>, 1989), and read your whole delicious way through.\u00a0 Hart grows as a writer as the series progresses, so it\u2019s a wonderful journey all around.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ellen Hart knocks another one out of the park.\u00a0 I continue with my mantra: if you love traditional detective fiction, few writers are doing it better than Ellen Hart at the moment.\u00a0 The air is sucked out of the room by some of the writers of traditional fiction set in England (Ann Cleeves, Deborah Crombie) … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5,214,415,215,100,416,13],"class_list":["post-3782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-americancozy","tag-ellen-hart","tag-in-a-midnight-wood","tag-jane-lawless","tag-minotaur-books","tag-mwa-grand-master","tag-suspensethriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3783,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782\/revisions\/3783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}