As the promotional materials for the novel emphasize, it features a classically mismatched pair of "amateur" detectives. The title character, Dolly Madison "Maddy" Sprowls, is a middle-aged divorced woman who has for several decades managed the "morgue" of the daily newspaper in Hannawa, a mid-sized city in eastern Ohio that seems to be modeled on Canton. Over the years, Maddy has earned her reputation as a prickly character, but she also has a sentimental streak and a deepening sense of the losses that inexorably accumulate with the passage of time. For instance, as the newspaper gradually scans its archives into computer memory, Maddy hauls the file cabinets of manila envelopes full of clippings to the basement of her modest bungalow home. There she fills more than a few spare hours perusing the "old" news and simply enjoying the smell and the texture of the old newsprint.

Somewhat inexplicably, Maddy is charmed by the flintiness, the determination, and the matter-of-fact ambition of the paper's new crime reporter, Aubrey McGinty. Fairly quickly, Aubrey enlists Maddy as a sort of co-investigator as she delves into the truth behind the murder of a local but nationally known televangelist named Buddy Wing. During one of his televised services, Buddy had dramatically keeled over, the victim of a redundant poisoning, and all of the evidence had quickly pointed to a reformed prostitute named Sissy James, who readily confessed to the crime. But Aubrey suspects that Sissy was framed, that she confessed to protect a former lover, and that a well-publicized schism among Wing's protégés and the members of the congregation had been a central factor in the crime.

C. R. Corwin is the pseudonym of a retired journalist, and the novel benefits greatly from the author's experience. It convincingly conveys the atmosphere in the offices of a mid-sized newspaper and in the streets of a mid-sized rust-belt city that has stagnated somewhere between real prosperity and wholesale decline. It demonstrates the author's knowledge of the various trajectories that journalistic careers can take and, more broadly the author's understanding of the tensions that define the relationships between journalists and the communities they serve. It also includes information on such relevant but diverse topics as uncommonly used but commonly available poisons and the spiritual phenomenon of "speaking in tongues."

One of the considerable charms of the novel is the narrative voice. The point of view is limited to Maddy Sprowl's perspective, and the first-person narration reflects the oppositions in her personality: she is somewhat old-fashioned without being completely anachronistic, ironic without being viciously cutting, and whimsically humorous without being self-indulgently silly. The narration is divided into dated entries, and almost any one of these sections contains some oddly charming passages. For instance, in a section dated "Monday, April 3," Maddy describes Nanette Bean, the religion editor, in these terms: "She was cradling another cactus for her desk. She already had a dozen of them, some of them two feet tall. The newsroom joke is that they thrive on Nanette's dry prose." Several paragraphs later, she describes her assistant Eric's hairy hands as "attacking his keyboard like tap-dancing tarantulas."

In the section dated "Friday, April 28," Maddy makes the following observation about the increased attendance at the services in Buddy Wing's church following his murder: "it was the same morbid fascination that sends hundreds of thousands of teary-eyed tourists to Graceland year after year, even though they didn't give a rip about Elvis when he was alive." When she first enters Aubrey's very modest and very messy apartment, she wonders out loud, ’'How can someone own nothing and still live in a hovel?" And, in her thoughts, she describes Aubrey's uncharacteristically wearing a dress to a service at Wing's church as looking "about as comfortable as my brother the dairy farmer looks in his polyester wedding-and-funeral suit from Sears." What she actually says to Aubrey is, ”All you need is a white purse and pearls.”

So, given that I have very much enjoyed all of these aspects of the novel, why have I begun by asserting that it is "seriously flawed"? Well, the resolution of the novel is so abrupt that I reread the passage a half-dozen times and even checked for missing pages, thinking that I must have missed something. And, worse, the resolution violates the principle of "fair play," whereby pertinent information is not arbitrarily concealed from the reader and then suddenly revealed to heighten the climax. Because this is a first-person novel and moreover because it is presented as a sort of personal journal, it is completely unfair not only that Maddy withholds pertinent information, but also that she, in effect, cons the reader much as she cons the real killer.

Without revealing too much, I will add, however, that this abrupt and unsatisfying resolution of the narrative does set up fascinating possibilities for subsequent novels in the series. The promotional materials compare Maddy and Aubrey to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin - emphasizing the pairing of a more mature and reflectively observant passive investigator with a younger, more energetic, and more impulsive active investigator. But the resolution of the novel very much complicates the correlation.

--Martin Kich