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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 18 |
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of a SLEEPING BEAUTY  The new SCUMBLE RIVER MYSTERY |
Skye Denison sleuths again,
probing a campus murder
of TheColumnists.com
Lorelei Ingels is the most beautiful high school senior in Scumble River, Illinois. She's the queen of everything that hands out crowns and her future figures to be just one long coronation ceremony--except for one troubling development: She's dead.
They find her one day, laid out in all her finery on the set of the school drama production in which she plays Sleeping Beauty. She's still a beauty, but she's long gone in what Raymond Chandler liked to call "the big sleep." There's not a mark on her, no signs of violence or sexual attack. She's just deader than the proverbial doornail.
Did she suffer some kind
of attack? Hardly; she was in perfect health. Did she o.d. on
drugs? Not likely, since she didn't do drugs or alcohol or anything
else that might mess up her physical beauty. Could she have been
poisoned? Well, that's a possibility, but didn't everybody love
her?
That turns out to be the big question that school psychologist
Skye Denison needs to answer when she starts looking into Lorelei's
death in "Murder of A Sleeping Beauty" (Signet, $5.99),
third in the Scumble River mystery series created by Denise Swanson,
herself a school psychologist. I might add she also resembles
Sky Denison quite a bit in the right light and lives in an Illinois
community you might mistake for Scumble River if you happened
to turn up there some night after taking the wrong off ramp from
the freeway.
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"detective" Skye Denison, is a school psychologist in Illinois. |
Swanson's strong suit is her characters, who all seem reasonably credible, especially Skye, who's a single woman in her late 30s, slightly concerned about her tendency to put on weight and not real happy with the losers she keeps attracting as suitors. Skye doesn't consider herself a detective, but somehow her family, friends and school officials keep expecting her to sort out what the cops can't seem to do whenever a serious crime occurs.
This mystery is a traditional whodunnit, but with a serious vein of social commentary running through it. Swanson is very hard on the moms who drive their daughters to become beauty queens, no matter what the cost. As you read it, you won't be blamed if you start thinking about the notorious "Texas cheerleader-murdering mom" case that the late Michael Ritchie turned into a fabulously funny movie for HBO--or even "Smile," the earlier Ritchie film about a cutthroat beauty contest in the suburbs. You also are likely to start thinking of Lorelei as an older, less innocent version of a certain little girl beauty contestant in Colorado whose murder still remains unsolved.
To get to the bottom of the case, Skye has to work outside the law with, as Lennon and McCartney might say, "a little help from her friends." In one such escapade, for instance, Skye figures the local coroner/undertaker probably has a copy of the autopsy report on Lorelei that the chief of police won't let her read. Her zeal for searching out the truth leads her to break into the mortuary at midnight. What happens to her there is for you to find out, but I will say she somehow winds up in a coffin.
Swanson writes an intelligent mystery that seldom bogs down. If I must carp about something, it would be the lack of any real cliffhanger moments. It would have been helpful if Skye found herself in serious jeopardy a couple of times, but you will understand why that was rather impractical once the mystery is solved.
Swanson's Scumble River series has found a loyal following among mystery readers and has been nominated for some of the more prestigious awards in the genre. It neatly fits into the major trend in contemporary mystery toward "detectives" who are serious professionals, but clearly outside the formal world of police work.
I might add that I certainly hope Swanson's imagination accounts for most of the cold-hearted, even cold-blooded, competition she describes among middle American high school girls. If she's telling it like it is, our society is in even bigger trouble than I thought it was.
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is © 2002 by New American Library. The
Denise Swanson photo is from her website at www.deniseswanson.com.
Ron
Miller is the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the
official companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series.
He currently teaches "The Curious History of Mystery"
at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington.
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