BOOK REVIEW

A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read. Edgar Award nominee

(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) It's 1988 and twenty-something Maddie Dare has drifted into a dead-end life in Syracuse, NY. She writes recipes for minimum wage at the town paper. Her husband's job takes him on the road for weeks at a time.

Somehow life didn't turn out as expected for Maddie – a scion of a wealthy, blue-blood WASP family. Even though she scorns her debutante days, and even though her hapless parents squandered their part of the family fortune, she still misses the excitement that money can buy. 

She has no regrets about her husband who comes from a hardscrabble farm family.  But Syracuse itself is driving her crazy with boredom. So when her acerbic father-in-law Cal thinks she should write up a feature on an unsolved crime from 19 years ago, she halfway considers it.  Two girls were found dead in a cornfield posed in a strange tableau:   hand-in-hand and wearing crowns woven of roses.

The girls were seen at the county fair with two soldiers bound for Vietnam, but the cops couldn't find any evidence with which to convict anyone. However Cal found something recently while helping to plow the old cornfield:  a set of military dog-tags. Feigning interest, Maddie has a look, and gets a bad shock. The dog-tags belonged to her favorite cousin Lapthorne. He had been one of the soldiers. Did he kill the girls back in 1969?

Murder has no statute of limitations.  It's up to Maddie to investigate and clear Lapthorne's name before it occurs to Cal to take the dog-tags to the cops. So she starts poking around the gritty working-class surface of Syracuse.

Soon she turns up a scorpion's nest of suspects, including a heroin junkie who fashions silhouettes of people at the county fairs, a crooked cop, and the weird staff photographer who works with her at the paper.  Meanwhile other gruesome murders start happening. Each one involves a body posed in a tableau from a fairy tale. Maddie is about to descend into the nightmare world of a serial killer, and she has only her own sharp wits to keep her alive.

A Field of Darkness is an outstanding novel, full of fresh and vivid sentences and ever-increasing suspense.  Maddie herself admits on page 91, "I have a weakness for snark." If you can get past the snark factor (which is sometimes considerable) you will find her a wonderful heroine: smart, vulnerable, and funny.  You shouldn't hesitate to buy A Field of Darkness for your collection.  You can find A Field of Darkness on Amazon through this link:

A Field of Darkness

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