The Start of Everything by Emily Winslow

Delacorte Press, 272 pages, $26

The person whom I thought would solve the mystery — a great character — turns out not to be “the one.” But I loved Mathilde Oliver anyway. Mathilde is a young woman who is on the spectrum, although that is never said outright. She works handling dead letters at a college in Cambridge, England. That is, she tries to unite ostensibly undeliverable mail with their recipients. She is also the narrator of some of the chapters. Initially, it is confusing being in her brain without any back story. Emily Winslow makes you work to know Mathilde.

Then the police characters are introduced, and they have problems of their own. Detective Inspector Chloe Frohmann is sick to her stomach. Her partner and superior, DCI Morris Keene, has just returned to work after an incident in which he received serious injuries. He is still suffering from damage to his dominant hand. It is painful to watch him navigate the world. Frohmann tries to accommodate Keene’s new difficulties, but she realizes he needs more help than she can provide. Nevertheless, they must solve the mystery of the dead body discovered in a fen after its waters receded. The victim is a young woman, unidentifiable, but gradually additional pieces of information come to light.

For her part of the story, Mathilde is trying to find the “Katja” of one of her “dead letters.” The writer, “Stephen,” leaves vague clues about his identity and simply addresses his letter to “Katja” at Mathilde’s college. In the latest letter, he tells Katja he is about to arrive in her city and would like to see her. Mathilde has an obsessive need to find Stephen. There is no Katja at the college, and she needs more clues from him to find her. She goes to meet his train.

Both Frohmann and Keene take their turns doing first-person narratives. Keene’s emotional fragility compromises everything he does. Frohmann is struggling to handle all the work once shared between the two of them. Then a bloody hammer is found. The head of the hammer matches the indentation in the victim’s skull. 

The storylines eventually merge and the hunt is on for the killer. That leads to some painful individual stories. Killers and victims do not exist in a vacuum, and there are usually many people dragged into the whirlpool of murder. There are no winners, only moral choices.

There are some stories which should not be reviewed in depth. I think this is one of them, because it’s important that the reader make the discoveries along with the detectives. As a pertinent aside, I just read a letter of complaint to the New York Times Book Review from a reader who said reviewers gave too much information away in their write-ups of books. I try not to divulge too much, but sometimes praise is given and elements must be revealed. But not in this case.

I am looking forward to the next book in the series, apparently titled, “The Red House.”