Deer Season by Erin Flanagan

University of Nebraska Press, 320 pages, $21.95 (c2021)

This is a special book and it is a mystery, but the emphasis is on character development. And on setting. And on plot. It’s everything done well.

It won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.

If you have grown up in a small town, maybe this book will strike a particular resonance with you. Everybody is up in everybody else’s business. Everybody, it seems, gossips, even the most saintly sometimes. Not that Alma Costagan is saintly and she hates gossip.

Alma still sees herself as a Chicago girl. So what is this middle-aged woman with wrecked dreams of a large family doing in rural Nebraska, helping to run a farm? She married Clyle — that’s not a typo of “Clyde” — who wooed Alma at college and worked for IBM in Chicago. When Clyle’s widowed mother became ill, he and Alma shut down their lives in Chicago, temporarily they thought, to help with the family farm in Nebraska. Even after his mother died, Clyle was still drawn to the small-town life he had always treasured and the hard farm work in which he found satisfaction. Alma thought she could adjust. Fifteen years later, she is pretty tired of trying to adjust. Alma speaks her mind and, as an ex-social worker, tries to help others. Blunt and in-your-face.

Hal is the person Alma has silently chosen for her project. Because of a swimming accident that occurred when he was two — due to the negligence of his careless mother — Hal has a diminished intellect. Clyle and Alma have taken him under their wing. He helps with chores around their farm and when he was younger he slept in their house. They’ve been helping him mainstream, but that has its limits. On the outside, Hal seems normal, even somewhat attractive. Many a woman has flirted with him, only to be dismayed at his inability to maintain a social interaction. 

Peggy Ahern is a 17-year-old next-door neighbor of the Costagans. She is smart, pretty, popular, and testing life on the wild side in Gunthrum, Nebraska, the latter on the sly, of course. Her 12-year-old brother Milo, also smart, knows she sometimes disappears late at night to meet up with her friends to party. In contrast, Milo follows the rules, is a good friend, tries to fly beneath the radar. He is the quiet to his sister’s loud. Surprisingly, they are mostly friends. Here’s a snippet about them:

For a twelve-year-old nerd and a volleyball-playing cheerleader, they had more in common than others might expect, and a lot of their time was spent talking about the days they’d leave for college, their Podunk years in Gunthrum behind them.

We mostly view the book by hanging out with Alma and Milo, although sometimes we follow Clyle. it is through their interactions with each other and the town that we view the disappearance of teenage Peggy one cold night.

At first, no one can find Peggy. Her parents pretend she has run away in a youthful escapade. Milo half believes she has done just that, to begin her life in the bigger world, but she wouldn’t have left without telling him. It is Milo who first reckons with the fact that she is probably dead. To her family, other people mouth platitudes and wildly optimistic predictions for Peggy’s return.

Sheriff Peck Randolph has never had to deal with this kind of case before. He is a big and stolid presence in Gunthrum, and knows when to pull back and when to push the locals with their wrongdoing. It doesn’t help that Peggy’s family doesn’t alert his office until she has been gone awhile. 

Mistaking a flirty move by Peggy one day at a picnic, Hal develops a crush on Peggy. He is twenty but does not understand adult interactions. He is besotted, and this is what eventually gets him into trouble. Peggy is gone; Hal must be responsible. The town’s focus has almost unanimously focused on Hal. Big, hot-tempered (because he can’t understand some situations), and with a dimming bulb, Hal cannot understand why people suspect him. He doesn’t even understand that people suspect him! It doesn’t help that when asked what he was doing the night of Peggy’s disappearance, it turns out he was in the vicinity of where she was last seen. When Alma and Clyle ask if he hit Peggy with his truck, Hal hems and haws and says he doesn’t think so.

That is the mystery in a nutshell. But the book is about so much more.

Using Peggy’s disappearance as a vehicle, author Erin Flanagan explores the dynamics of small town justice. People are guilty until proven innocent. Past behavior haunts families for generations. Alma now despises the people she once fraternized with when she first arrived. She no longer wants to bake “the best” brownies, drink herself into a lost weekend at other people’s homes, play kissy-face with other men, or attend their sanctimonious churches. Everything would be more tolerable if she had been able to bring any one of her miscarried babies to birth. As we meet her, she is filling in this void with driving the school bus and mother-henning Hal. But her sharp tongue has turned people away from her and even her husband, once loyal, kind, and loving to her, has gone silent around her. What has she lost and does she want it back? Here’s a bit about their disintegrating marriage, “The list of what one person would never understand about another went on and on.” As Alma becomes more frantic in her desire to protect Hal, and then Milo, she draws her emotions in tight and trusts no one.

Poor Milo, who has not done anything wrong, is caught up in his family’s storm. With difficult parents and unwanted sympathy from the community, Milo feels under siege. Another kid says, 

‘You don’t know-know because you’re twelve.’

Milo hated when people used that as an excuse. it was like people saying you’re a boy or from rural Nebraska. What did that have to do with anything?

Peggy’s disappearance coincides with the important family event of Milo’s confirmation at the Lutheran Church:

[Milo] thought about all the words he’d memorized for his confirmation, the oath he’d taken to God. Was that just another lie everyone told so they could get up in the morning? Were all these people who thought nothing bad could happen just fooling themselves?

What a fraught picture Flanagan paints of a community in crisis! There is a lot of finger-pointing and ill-based anger as the community fractures. Flanagan paints this so well. She tackles the thoughts of a 12-year-old and a middle-aged woman equally well. I almost thought Flanagan wasn’t going to solve the mystery. Other books have left things hanging, because, well, sometimes that’s real life.

MBTB star!

The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Negendra

Pegasus Crime, 304 pages, $26.95

Murder is an act most foul, and its portrayal in crime stories can be quite graphic. In 1920s India, there was overcrowding, shantytowns, beggars, a sense that life was cheap for a certain percentage of the population. There’s nothing sweet about the act at the center of a murder mystery or the problems emblematic of British-controlled India of that time period. The days of the Raj were not happy ones for the colonized, even if they were of a high caste or well-placed family. There was bigotry, racism, misogyny, religious persecution. Given all of that, “The Bangalore Detectives Club” is sweet.

It’s not as though all of the problems above are glossed over, either. Author Harini Negendra does the almost impossible task of including all those elements without making her story heavily laden with bitterness. Negendra does that with the use of her light and optimistic main characters.

Kaveri has just moved to Bangalore from her town to live with her husband, Ramu. They have been married for three years, but only started to live together after Kaveri reached a certain age. Fortunately, Ramu is a good husband with modern ideas, honed by his years in London as a student. It’s that kind of book. Kaveri cannot cook, so that is one of the wifely duties she undertakes to improve. But that’s not why you are reading the book — although the food sounds delicious (recipes follow in an appendix). When murder intrudes, her educated, mathematical, Sherlock-loving brain revs up. Sometimes accompanied by a grandmotherly type from next door with not enough to do (Uma aunty), she decides to solve the murder of a pimp, whose body was found on the grounds of the Century Club, where Kaveri and Ramu were having a fancy dinner with other doctors.

To be fair, there is a personal element to her involvement. The main suspect is her milkman. He would bring his cow to Kaveri’s house, milk it there, and sell the milk to Kaveri. When Manju suddenly stops showing up and his younger brother, Venu, takes over, the plot thickens. What has happened to the reliable Manju who was supporting his family with the cow’s milk and work as a helper at the hospital. Surprisingly, he has shown up as a waiter at the Century Club dinner, and Kaveri is dying to talk to him. She doesn’t get the chance because she witnesses confrontations on the lawn between Manju and a beautiful woman and between the beautiful woman and the pimp. Then Manju disappears.

Soon after, Manju’s long-suffering, pregnant wife is hit over the head and lapses into a coma. Then one of the doctors suffers the same fate. What is going on?

Flavored with both the British and Indian — I think most of the Indians are Hindi — points of view, Negendra gives us a good, gentle look at the clash of cultures.

Kaveri is young, smart, and intrepid. Caste or social status does not bother her. She socializes with the British upper class and comforts a prostitute. Because of her husband’s open mind, she learns how to drive a car, cook with her husband, and sift clues together. It doesn’t hurt that the investigation’s police detective, Ismail, is open minded as well! Ramu and Ismail give her access to clues, listen to her reasoning, and have her back.

This was quite enjoyable.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

Atria Books, 432 pages, $27.99

What did I like about this book? Some of the gimmicks. What did I not like about this book? The rest of the gimmicks.

Ostensibly, when you have many voices vying for attention, it’s great if they sound different. Mostly the characters in “The Appeal” were indistinguishable. That shows up especially because of the format of the story. It is an epistolary work; that is, you read a lot of emails, some phone texts, and a few letters, and an occasional legal memo. I guess the voice of Martin Hayward of the manor born sounds a little more sophisticated than that of Issy Beck, a shy nurse. I’m talking tone here, not content. In terms of content the various characters reveal very different aspects of themselves and the mystery.

What exactly is the mystery? It takes a really long time, but someone does die. And there are criminal irregularities. And there are criminous characters. And there is at least one killer. And there are characters who may not be real. And there are diseases du jour. There’s a lot in the mix.

The basic plot revolves around the cast and crew of a tiny local drama society, The Fairview Players, in a small town in England. Some of those players are also connected to the local medical community, the other group around which the story revolves.

The Hayward family is the local aristocracy and they run the Players and appear in the center of the drama that starts the story rolling. Martin Hayward is the patriarch. He is also the director of the Players’ productions. He has announced he cannot continue with the current production because his granddaughter, two-year-old Poppy, has a rare type of brain cancer and his whole family — most of whom are vital members of the cast and crew — must circle their wagons to help her. Everything is thrown into chaos, especially for Issy. The Players group is everything to her, balancing her aggravating, unsatisfying nursing job. She would do anything to help the Players continue.

Martin announces he needs a lot of money to pay for a special American treatment that is in its preliminary stages. Sarah-Jane MacDonald is the local soccer mom. Not literally. She is just the one who can organize your sock drawers or your fundraising dinner. Also, let’s put on a play! The small group of Players dreams of many ways to eke money out of the local crowd. Maybe it will get wider press. Yay!

Samantha Greenwood and her husband, Kel, have just moved to the town. They are both nurses and they meet Issy. Issy immediately adopts Sam as her new best friend and gets Sam and Kel involved in the Players.

Hmm. Let’s throw some intrigue into this. The doctor handling Poppy’s cancer protocol and arranging for the experimental treatment is Dr. Tish Bhatoa. How odd that it turns out Sam knows Dr. Bhatoa from work they both did in Africa, where Kel and Sam lived for many years until moving to the little English town. There is some friction between the two, which, of course, is not explained for a long time.

Let’s add one more layer to make it even more complicated. All the emails, texts, etc., are materials belonging to Roderick Tanner, QC. He has forwarded them to some assistants, Femi and Charlotte. They are to review the materials without knowing the outcome of the story or the disposition of the characters, and give their opinion on what strikes the wrong notes. Seriously? It’s a flimsy pretext, but okay, I’ll climb on board. Every once in a while, we get a text exchange between Femi and Charlotte reviewing the documents, i.e., let us hit you over the head with what has been covered so far.

Roderick Tanner, QC, doesn’t really count. He appears as a relic to advance the story. From the start, he knows who was murdered and who was arrested for the murder. What he wants to know is did the right person get caught? He wants Femi and Charlotte to construct the case out of something close to thin air. Not all the parties to the events are represented by the emails, texts, etc. Some are noticeably absent. We never see anything from Sam, for instance. Stay calm and carry on.

“The Appeal” refers both to the fundraising and to the overlying court case.

The story is enticing enough that I read all 432 pages, but I’m telling you, the book should have been made a little leaner and meaner. I dodged and wove my way around the gimmicks. Kudos to the author for coming up with something original. I finished it. I want an award.