Mr. Flood's Last Resort by Jess Kidd

(Note: This book is also known as "The Hoarder.")
Washington Square Press, 352 pages, $16.99 (c2018)

“Mr. Flood's Last Resort” is set in London. Pish posh! I heard the entire book spoken with an Irish accent. Cathal Flood and Maud Drennan, the two main characters, would perhaps amend this description slightly, but I heard what I heard.

Speaking of hearing what one hears, Maud Drennan, a young woman working as a health care giver, sees dead saints. She talks to them, they walk with her, they play pranks on people, they deny her a look into anything helpful although they know, they know.

“Mr. Flood's Last Resort” is rife with missing girls. Something happened to Maud’s older sister when Maud was very young. That story haunts the book, with narrative nuggets strewn throughout until the end. Another girl who becomes a growing mystery is Marguerite Flood, perhaps a relative of Cathal Flood.

Ah, Cathal Flood. When Maud is sent to take care of him, he is an old man with hoarding habits. We are told that hoarding is often an offshoot of deep grief. What does Cathal Flood mourn? His wife died twenty-five years earlier. But did he murder her? It would have been so easy for him to have pushed her down the stairs, which is how she died. He is estranged from his adult son, Gideon — Dr. Flood, if you please — a pompous, idiotic, and shifty drama and theater lecturer. And what has happened to his daughter, Marguerite? If there had been such a daughter? He refuses to talk about any of his family.

The last young girl, Maggie Dunne, disappeared from a seaside town when she was fifteen, more than twenty-five years ago. Why was Cathal’s wife, Mary, obsessed with her? She collected newspaper clippings about her disappearance.

Cathal is a “retired artist, mechanical engineer and dealer in curiosities.”  He has closed off most of his four-story mansion with an impressively engineered wall of old “National Geographic” magazines. His truncated living area is filthy with litter, hoarded items, cats, a fox, and mostly a mundane accumulation of detritus. Maud is determined to clear the area so Cathal won’t be shuffled off to assisted living.

Maud’s landlady, the colorful, eccentric, and agoraphobic Renata, is convinced that Maud’s life is in danger while working at Bridlemere, Cathal’s mansion. The danger, Renata says, is Cathal is obviously a murderer, having done away with his wife and maybe the mysterious daughter, and he surely is aiming for Maud next. (Ominously, the saints won’t enter Bridlemere with Maud, although they travel most everywhere else with her.)

To emphasize how threatening Cathal might be, this is Maud talking about the disclaimer portion of her employment contract: “…if I had paid more attention I would have noted the words: council raid, booby traps, ingenious mechanisms, police caution.”

Maud, Renata, and Sam Hebden, a young man Maud meets skulking around the mansion, have gathered together in an informal murder committee to solve any and all murders. This is a charming group. Renata unleashes her hidden forensic investigator (and her array of wigs) and Maud just hitches up her I'm-intrepid-don't-mess-with-me britches. 

Renata sums up the group’s remit: “… what does the old man have on his son, what does Gabriel want so badly from the house and what have the Floods to do with the disappearance of Maggie Dunne?” 

“Mr. Flood's Last Resort” is a delight. The revelations every time Cathal and Maud meet are a heady mix of sweetness, tension, sadness, and joy. 

Read this. After you have read it, wonder why there isn’t a follow-up book. I wonder why. Hope springs about someday holding that follow-up in my greedy little hands.