Goodwin’s opus grows by leaps and bounds—he’s introducing Venator, a Salt Lake City company that applies genetic genealogy techniques to criminal cold cases. Madison “Maddie” Scott-Barnhart is the company’s hands-on founder, employing a small, dedicated team. Police departments requesting Venator’s specialized service must be able to provide DNA evidence for a suspect in an old unsolved case. Upon testing that DNA, Venator’s work begins, tracing matches back to a common ancestor, then tracing families forward to candidates who might be the actual perpetrator. Simple in theory, extremely time-consuming and complex in every instance. So it goes, with the case of three murdered women whose bodies were dumped in Chester Creek, Pennsylvania.
Goodwin not only constructs an absorbing example of genealogical methods but brings to life the Venator team individuals. Kenyatta is in custody limbo regarding her sons; she befriends a homeless man who alerts her to the approaching coronavirus (it’s March 2020). Hudson is the computer geek who secretly undertakes a well-paying but unethical side job. Becky is energetic and athletic, daughter of a wealthy local businessman; she dabbles in online dating sites. Ross holds the office together as receptionist, also being Becky’s roommate. Maddie’s home life includes two teenagers and an increasingly demented mother. Thoughts of her husband Michael, who disappeared five years ago, are never far away but less painful now. If one is at all familiar with Goodwin, any one of those characters will spin off a future mystery angle.
As the team spends hundreds of hours painstakingly building family charts, we get glimpses of the killer’s past actions and victims. It’s crucial that Venator determine the specific man, by all measures at their disposal, who matches the original police DNA sample. With that information, and if the man is matched on the national crime index, it’s game over. In this case he was not on the index, but police managed to obtain a DNA sample from the man without his knowledge. And voilà.
Venator is a welcome addition to Chez Goodwin, with more to come (please!). If you don’t already love the Morton Farrier mysteries set in southeast England, you can see and buy all the titles on Goodwin’s website as above. The Chester Creek Murders and others are also sold on Amazon.
Teasers
▪ “So ... I think he was hitting on you,” Becky whispered, nudging her elbow towards Maddie. (30)
▪ Almost all of the process of investigative genetic genealogy was about hunches, blind alleys, rabbit holes, wild goose chases and a whole bunch of maybes, likelys and possiblys and very little in the way of absolutes until the end of the case drew close and a list of suspects had been identified. (31)
▪ “My kids are the bane and the sanity of my life all at once. To be honest, without them I don’t know how I would have gotten through these past five years.” (53)
▪ He had just wanted to hold on to that silence, to experience those long, long seconds of life gradually passing over to death. (55)
▪ “I’ve right-swiped all the eligible bachelors in the Salt Lake area and left-swiped all the rest; there’s seriously nobody left. I’m done with swiping.” (104)
▪ “I think people think we have some special access to the nation’s DNA evidence stores.” (104-5)
▪ From her quiet corner of the room, Becky tried to interpret the unspoken conversation taking place in the looks and body-language exchanges between her parents. (119)
▪ What had tipped them over the edge to perpetrate something so barbarically brutal? (186)
Fredrik Backman. A Man Called Ove. UK: Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton, 2014.
This was a must, after enjoying Anxious People so much. Has anyone ever written so articulately about an inarticulate, orderly, obstinate man? Ove (“Oo-vuh”) has had a more or less satisfactory life but since his beloved wife Sonja died, he has had enough. He is going to kill himself and join her. Unfortunately one neighbour or another always interrupts his plan du jour; he fails to hang himself, shoot himself, jump under a train, gas himself in his car, or ingest a great amount of pills. That neighbour, or some other situation, requires him to pause his preparations and help them out. Especially if the local council is giving someone a hard time, like for instance his neighbour Rune who used to be his friend; only occasionally they still see eye to eye. Nonetheless, if you have a lifelong loyalty to Saab, how can you trust a man who insists on buying Volvo?
The neighbours are so helpless they can’t even back up a trailer properly. Or fix their own radiators. They have undisciplined children and dogs. It’s bad enough having to chase cars off the grassy common areas of the housing estate. This is a man who desperately, silently, misses his wife. One time Sonja, a respected teacher, had been pregnant like Parvaneh next door. What happened, then, turned Ove even more antisocial in his sorrow and free-floating anger. But Parvaneh is as persistent as the stray cat that decides to live with him. And when Rune develops dementia, no way is Ove going to allow the social services to lock him up in a home. An unforgettable story of the most interesting curmudgeon you ever met.
Ove
▪ Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than one eighty-five; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain. (14)
▪ There was a certain liberation in doing a job. Grabbing hold of things with his own two hands and seeing the fruit of his efforts. (63)
▪ Now everything had to be computerised, as if one couldn’t build a house until some consultant in a too-small shirt figured out how to open a laptop. (73)
▪ He has certainly not begun this day with the intention of letting either women or cats into his house, he’d like to make that very clear to her. (139)
▪ He didn’t like children an awful lot. He hadn’t even been very good at being a child. (156-7)
▪ He misses her so much that sometimes he can’t bear existing in his own body. (186)
▪ “Tag along, then,” he urges the cat without looking at it. “Let’s give that village cur something to think about.” (191)
▪ Nowadays the post can be delivered halfway through the afternoon any old way it pleases. The post office takes care of it when it feels like it and you just have to be grateful and that’s it. (196-7)
▪ That was the best thing about the house. It was never finished. There was always a screw somewhere for Ove to tighten. (226)
▪ That’s what Ove misses most of all. Having things the same as usual. (227)
Others
▪ “Christ ... have you locked someone in the garage, Ove!?” Ove didn’t answer. Parvaneh shook him as if trying to dislodge some coconuts. (170)
▪ The baggy skin on Rune’s face cracks into a sleepy smile. Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all. (191-2)
▪ “God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others.” (229)
No dancing here
He’d never been one for dancing. It seemed far too haphazard and giddy. He liked straight lines and clear decisions. That was why he had always liked mathematics. There were right or wrong answers there. Not like the other hippy subjects they tried to trick you into doing at school, where you could “argue your case.” As if that was a way of concluding a discussion: checking who knew more long words. Ove wanted what was right to be right, and what was wrong to be wrong. (96-7)
Driving lessons
The driving lesson doesn’t start so well. Or, to be precise, it begins with Parvaneh trying to get into the Saab with a bottle of fizzy juice in her hand. She shouldn’t have done that. Then she tries to fiddle with Ove’s radio to find “a more entertaining channel.” She shouldn’t have done that either.
Ove picks up the newspaper from the floor, rolls it up and starts nervously striking it against his hand, like a more aggressive version of a stress ball. She grabs the wheel and looks at the instruments like a curious child.
“Where do we start?” she yells eagerly, after at long last agreeing to hand over the juice.
Ove sighs. The cat sits in the back seat and looks as if it wished, with intensity, that cats knew how to strap on safety belts.
“Press the clutch pedal,” says Ove, slightly grim.
Parvaneh looks around her seat as if searching for something. Then she looks at Ove and smiles ingratiatingly.
“Which one’s the clutch?”
Ove’s face fills with disbelief. (203)
Spare the cat
Of course, he was supposed to have died today. He had been planning to calmly and peacefully shoot himself in the head just after breakfast. He’d tidied the kitchen and let the cat out and made himself comfortable in his favourite armchair. He’d planned it this way because the cat routinely asked to be let out at this time. One of the few traits of the cat that Ove was highly appreciative of was its reluctance to crap in other people’s homes. Ove was a man of the same ilk. (232)
Tarryn Fisher. The Wrong Family. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Graydon House Books/ Harlequin, 2020.
Oops, forgotten that I’d read one of her previous (LL213). Okay, the underlying premise is pretty darn farfetched ... when you figure it out. Maybe I missed something critical in the first 200 pages? Am I speedreading? Winnie and Nigel Crouch live in a lovely old Seattle home with thirteen-year-old son Samuel (“call me Sam”). In the park across the street, Sam befriends what appears to be a homeless woman. She, Juno, was once a successfully practising psychologist; we wait a long time to discover why she ended up on the street. Juno’s life becomes entwined with the Crouches, in an uncomfortable way.
Winnie is a social worker who took time off when Sam was born. She’s gregarious and house proud and shares her every feeling with gossiping friends. Her birth family of sisters and a twin brother is one of those you-may-love-them but you-don’t-have-to-like-them varieties. Winnie argues a lot with Nigel who mainly tries to keep his mouth shut as much as possible. Hints of some terrible act she did in the past are somehow tied to Juno whose existence Winnie is unaware. It’s creepy, and there’s a bloody climax but, sorry, I never felt the necessary tension between any of the characters. The atmosphere felt more and more disorganized with a confusing timeline and scrambled thoughts from the women, as if the story was hastily thrown together for a disappointing anticlimax. Not an author I would deliberately pick up again.
Winnie
▪ If Nigel tried to do things his own way, Winnie would watch him like a hawk, waiting for him to mess up. And he did – he always did. (23)
▪ Today was their fifteenth wedding anniversary, and they were having powdered eggs for dinner. (31)
▪ Call her a snob. Everyone else did. (86)
▪ She had to be Samuel’s mom today, not Nigel’s angry wife. (109)
▪ They may not have signed on for the type of marriage that turned up, but here they were, living it. (231)
▪ Her husband was busted like a cracked wine bottle, leaking on her hardwood. (327)
▪ “She’s having a panic attack,” she heard someone say. (374)
Juno
▪ It had been that way for quite some time, the disease raking its way across her joints. (17)
▪ Juno wasn’t making fun; it was just a fact—Winnie wasn’t drinking from a deep pool. Or at least Juno hadn’t thought so, until now. (81)
▪ Sam was the minefield they were tiptoeing around. (107)
▪ She’d watched them, wanted them, and found a home with them. (174)
▪ You’re sicker than your clients, you know that? You’re the one who needs help! (238)
▪ “Josalyn, you live in a tent. A tent isn’t a home for a baby.” (265)
▪ That was survival, disappearing when you needed to. (338)
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