I'm just delighted with this perceptive Open Salon review of "Wilful Murder" (the second book in my Alicia Allen Investigates Trilogy) that posted a couple days ago. Thank you!
Book Review
"Wilful Murder" Untangles Bloody Family Tree.
Look to the past to see what the future holds. —Wilful
Murder
Who doesn't enjoy a ripping good tale of a Will,
murdered relatives and love's labor rewarded? For Wilful Murder, the second book in the Alicia Allen
Investigates trilogy, British author Celia Conrad
has concocted a pastiche composed of the basic elements we expect in a murder
mystery that spins on disgruntled relatives, and reinvented it as
part-Travelogue, part-Greek Tragedy, part-Shakespeare and part-Love
Story.
If you love "cozy mysteries" with their
gentle no-sex-or-graphic-violence paradigms, and strong, intuitive female
amateur sleuths; and you love "cerebral mysteries" with their
complicated Ah Ha! plots, then I highly
recommend Wilful Murder for
your next great read.
And if you know nothing about cozies or cerebrals,
but just love a bittersweet romantic subplot where a dynamic duo slug it out
until they (almost) fall into each other's arms á la Hepburn and
Tracy--then yes, this book's for you too.
I do suggest reading Book 1, A Model Murder, first. Although few of the first book's
characters and almost none of its setting make their way into the second,
there's little exposition to bring the newbie up to speed in terms of what has
happened in the past to create the present circumstances that open the story.
In the previous book, Alicia Allen--the
Anglo-Italian woman lawyer with a passion for justice--makes friends with an
Australian neighbor who works at the law firm where Alicia has just been newly
hired. The young, pretty Australian, Kim, has a crush on her boss,
Alex, who in turn has a thing for the incomparable Alicia.
At the end of A Model Murder, Alicia and Alex appear to be merrily strolling off into the sunset.
But alas, they are not a couple by the time we revisit Alicia in London.
As Wilful Murder opens,
Alicia is preparing to go to Kim's wedding in Australia. She is now estranged
from Alex who once courted her, but took off to work in Singapore. They are
still in touch, but Alicia carries resentment at Alex's decision to distance
himself from her.
"I
don't think you can afford to trust anyone..."
Alicia Allen is nothing if not cautious. She is not a
heroine who wears her heart on her sleeve, and in this, not unlike Patricia
Cornwall's psychologically wounded medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Like
Scarpetta, Alicia plays her cards close to her chest. She's not one to swoon
when Alex appears again--this time in Australia for Kim's wedding. For his
part, Alex wants nothing more than to woo Alicia, and he nearly turns himself inside
out trying.
Alicia has other things on her mind by the time she
crosses paths with the most-desirable-man-on-earth (aka "Alex").
Before leaving London, she took on a client with more troubles than her own:
Isabelle Parker, an heiress who is about to come into a magnificent fortune, if
she can stay alive long enough to inherit it. Relatives and relatives-to-be
have been dropping like proverbial flies, and the body count grows as the plot
proceeds.
Having read Book 1, we know that Alicia would rather
find the killer or killers than opt for a romantic fling with her ex-boyfriend
while she travels Australia on a kind of "working" holiday to
investigate the Australian-British ancestral ties of the endangered heiress.
She visits lovely beachy spots, dines in charming
cafes on exotic fare and visits museums--without her solicitious solicitor
suitor in tow. Quite frankly, those of us who might be lying boyfriendless on
some beach reading Wilful Murder may
wish to slap some sense into this righteous heroine, but thereis still that
voice inside our heads that shouts, "You go, Girl!" when she finally
gets physical in a life-threatening clinch with the killer as the story
approaches its denouement.
Conrad arranges for Alex to be out of the picture for
quite some time, and we are left to follow Alicia's head as she works out the
puzzle to solve these crimes. This is true to the "cerebral" mystery
style, and reminiscent of Agatha Christie's careful detailing and construction.
The plot is chock full of minor characters: most of whom we barely get to know.
In the first chapter, Isabelle's statements regarding
her ancestral history were so complex, I ended up mapping it out on paper so I
could keep track of who's who.
One of Conrad's great strengths is dialogue. I found
that if I simply "saw" the story as a film and let the dialogue carry
me through, A Wilful Murder came to
vivid life in my mind's eye.
"What are the two things most people kill
for?"
An ominous note received by imminent victims warns:
"Look to the past to see what the future
holds and make recompense for what those before you have
done..."
Conrad's handling of "the past" as it
pertains to Isabelle's tangled family tree gives a (perhaps unwitting) nod to
the Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex. The play
is made up mostly of exposition. We hear about the past...the past...the past.
The gory action of Oedipus gouging out his eyes when he realizes he's married
his mother is saved for the end. Conrad saves up her big action scenes for the
end--after we have been put through the wringer of cerebral dialogue that
examines the unaswered questions of the Past.
"Indecisive."
"Indecisive" is one of the last words in
the book, and reflects this tale's Hamlet aspects. Yes, Alicia catches the bouquet, but it has no more active
effect on her than Hamlet seeing his father's ghost. There is also something
Shakespearean in the way Conrad tends to kill off her characters
"offstage," so news of their demise are brought by messengers.
When the story comes together at the end--revealing
truths, tying up some loose ends and leaving others still hanging--it leaves
the reader feeling winded and yet oddly trimphant having made it across the
various locales and dangers that abide in Wilful Murder, and having found tourist pleasures in the Land Down
Under and returned to Great Britain, while still trying to figure out whodunit.
Wilful Murder
is built around the fine art of looking at the past--where we came from, what
made us who we are today, the skeletons in our closets that we may or may not
know about, and it prompts questions about whether we can make positive changes
such as opening our hearts again to someone in spite of all we've been through
or whatever pain still resides in our DNA.
Looking forward to the last book in the trilogy, Murder
in Hand and its take on Sicilian
corruption. Brava, Celia!
Sell Sheet Information
Title: Wilful Murder Author: Celia Conrad Publisher: Barcham Books (1 Dec 2011)
Paperback: 336 pages ISBN-10: 0954623339 ISBN-13: 978-0954623333
Dimensions: 14.9 x 21 cm
Amazon Kindle - ASIN: B00A1NCNRO
Also available in all E-Book Formats
Amazon U.S.:
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The second mystery in the Alicia Allen Investigates trilogy lures the
justice-loving solicitor out of London and into the shadowy depths of
the Land Down Under where nothing is what it seems and a risky Trust
could lead to murder.
