Marty Eberhardt, Silver City/Tucson mystery novelist, is a rare find. As in her premier outing for garden employee Bea Rivers, Eberhardt’s Bones in the Back Forty tells a sweet, sweet story. She offers a new genre of joyful suspense every time a reader cracks open one of her books.
A mystery reader who plunges into a chilling Scandinavian tale of mayhem knows that a sleepless night lies ahead. Not the case for Bones. A follower of the “classical” authors – Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, P.D. James, and even that pinnacle of sardonic humor, Janet Evanovich- encounters some stiff moments in their narratives. In Bones mystery has shucked its false ties to terror.
And the blue-eyed gossip of St. Mary Mead, the oh so deceiving Jane Marple? With a steely regard of humanity, she regularly rendered hapless English policemen to hopeless sputtering. Author Agatha Christie delivered well-constructed puzzles but seldom told sweet stories.
Is Eberhardt distinctive because she portrays no real villains? Just the opposite.
Bones is rife with miscreants able to commit murder in a fit of anger or to launch a lethal scheme for professional promotion. Her villains are the types who work next to us, whom we meet in grocery store aisles. For example, an adjunct academic who wears flip flops and Hawaiian shirts to the garden board meetings, rubbing colleague’s faces in his advanced degree, has surely earned our suspicion.
If her suspects, including shrewish wives of millionaires and snarky presidents of Chambers of Commerce, meet the villainy test, her “detectives” don’t belong to those mystery writers cited above. Macho, brooding males weigh down those “classics.” Bea and her buddy policewoman Marcia and the National Forest anthropologist Ramona and the town cop Sandra almost dos-y-dos through Bones.
In the end Eberhardt’s secret to sweetness lies In Bea’s kids. Kids keep the story real and the novelist’s insistence that Bea must sometimes obsess over parenting lifts the Bea Rivers series into new territory. The closest parallel is Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley’s creation whom critics call hard-boiled but who is really a sentimentalist crisped by the Southern California sun.
As a first-class mystery novel, Bones offers a compelling subplot, Bea’s romantic entanglement. Cliches like to pillory the modern American guy who refuses to commit to a relationship. Without commentary Eberhardt pulls a switch: Bea doesn’t want to face the changes that love may demand. The deck is stacked. Great-with-kids and sexy to boot, Frank needs to accept a plum job offer in Washington near to his mother who suffers from ALS. All the same, Bea hesitates. Occasionally the sweetest story has sour streaks.
Silver City readers can find a special attraction in Bones in the Back Forty. Besides sussing out who done the murder 30 years before the story began and besides predicting the crooked course of Bea’s love life, Silver Citians can uncover Eberhardt’s elaborate disguise of the Gila and of Silver City, the Burros and Lordsburg. (I don’t approve of her renaming our patch of paradise “Salvaje” but she saved matters by calling a particularly obnoxious character “Gert,” after the digestive disorder.)
If your book club selects this book, members can debate why Tucson can keep both its city name and its university while Silver City must accept the dull “Copperton” and a nameless college. In book club discussion, you may relish the author’s wry reference to Turfing Tucsonians who are campaigning to replace their gravel yards with fescue, guaranteed to suck the Colorado River dry.
This review has yet to mention an outstanding feature of the novel: plants. Pause for this paragraph. “At the end of the day, the rain had let up, and the desert smells pulled Bea out into the garden. She went out past the cactus garden with its huge barrel cacti massed together, raindrops glistening on yellow spines, past Madagascar pachypodiums, so-called because they looked like elephants’ trunks, past the limberbush in the native plant garden, leafless now, red-stemmed and springy, full of a latex-rich sap. In the wildflower garden, she took a sniff of an early blooming yellow brittlebush flower. The rain-smell propelled her past the fifteen acres of planted gardens to the back forty….”
Sweet, isn’t it?