Book
title: Wilful Murder (Alicia Allen Investigates 2)
Author:
Celia Conrad
Website:
www.alicialleninvestigates.com
Where
to buy the book: Amazon USA: http://tinyurl.com/p9wpw96
Genre:
Crime fiction
ISBN
9780954623333 (Paperback) & available in all Ebook formats
Publisher: Barcham
Books
Reviewed by Marlan Warren
originally
published in "Dancing in the Experience Lane" Open Salon Blog
“Look to
the past to see what the future holds…”
Wilful
Murder – Celia Conrad
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.
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 there is 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.
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 unanswered
questions of the Past.
"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.
-----
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