DWD's Reviews

This Edgar Award nominee does it again! Nancy Pickard I've regularly read Nancy Pickard's 'Jenny Cain' series and have been heartened by the growth I've seen in her work. Pickard's detective stories have slowly been growing in power and complexity. This novel, however, may very well mark Pickard's arrival as a true master of the detective story. I admit that I have not read another of this series, but I was struck by its simple cleverness. The writer of a 'true crime' novel becomes unnerved by doubts concerning the outcome of the trials and criminals that she has recently written about. Her own private investigation, interspersed with chapters from her recently completed 'true crime' book that fill the reader in on the back story, causes a great deal of distress and irritation among both the police and the real criminals. Very well done. Very clever. I'll be looking for more in the series. I rate this book 5 star...

A decent little mystery Dead Crazy is set in small-town New England and features Jenny Cain, the woman in charge of the areas philanthropical foundation (very much like Indianapolis's Lilly Foundation ) that makes investments and gives grants for the public good. The foundation is asked to buy a building so that it can be converted into a recreation/meeting hall for the mentally ill of the community - a place where they can get out of the cold and still be welcome. But, things quickly get complicated when people start dying in and around the building and a mentally ill man is the main suspect. The characters are believable, the book is well-paced and the killer is a surprise (I thought I had it figured out for about half the book, but ... I was wrong). I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. Reviewed August of 2004.

A marked improvement in the series . This is part of a series of books about Jenny Cain and her police detective husband, Geoff. In most of the books, Cain runs a philanthropic organization. In this book, she has left the foundation and is casting about for the finances to start another foundation in order to help the people of the New England seaport city of Port Frederick. While this is happening her husband has a mysterious visit from a teenage boy who claims that Geoff is his biological father and he wants nothing to do with Geoff except that he use his position as a policeman to re-investigate the murder-suicide of his parents and come up with a different conclusion. This novel is mostly notable for the fact that its author makes a serious effort to raise the bar in this series of run-of-the-mill mysteries. What she's created here is an actual novel - full of themes and interesting trips into her character's psyches. This book has all of the necessary ingredients f...