Death made nature’s lights less bright.
—from The Dead of Summer
One of the great strengths of Jean Rabe’s writing, among many, is her ability to immerse a reader in a scene or moment. It could be a loud and action-filled moment, or a quite and contemplative one, it doesn’t matter. Rabe’s art here is to wrap you in the sights and sounds surrounding, and the feelings and perceptions surging through, the character whose point-of-view is dominating the moment.
This strength is beautifully on display in the first chapter of Rabe’s recently published third Piper Blackwell mystery, The Dead of Summer.
Piper, the very young Sherriff of Spencer County, Indiana, is taking the day off and enjoying the county fair with her boyfriend when disaster strikes in the first sentence. Suddenly the air is filled with sounds of metal torturing metal, fairgoers screaming out in horror or calling out for help. Piper’s body moves fast toward the trouble as her mind races to try to comprehend what has happened. The sights, sounds, and smells of a county fair take on a surreal quality, but a darkly serious one, and the reader feels this deeply, becoming not just an observer but a participant.
One is tempted to call Rabe’s writing here cinematic, but it is far deeper and more textured than that. After all, inscribed fiction, whether poetry or prose, was the first virtual reality. The reading of a good translation of Homer’s The Illiad will convince you of that.
In The Dead of Summer, Rabe has fully matured into an author of mysteries. In the past Rabe concentrated on writing science fiction and fantasy, but, being a lover of mysteries, she always wanted to try her hand at this more “realistic” genre. So Rabe studied the genre to see what made good mystery novels work. She was an astute student. But what is best about her three Piper Blackwell mysteries is not the situations, the plot, the characters, or the puzzles—although all are contenders—but the exceptional artistry of her prose. It’s her intelligent, possibly instinctual, shaping of this virtual reality through the manipulating of words on a page, making the etherial tactile and the psychological palpable, that I celebrate.
But to what end? To characters who become flesh and blood; to situations that become immediate; to doubts, resentments, passions, anger, puzzlements, anxieties, pride, that become the reader’s in the trick of empathy that the best of fictions can conjure.
You don’t need to read the first two Piper Blackwell mysteries to read The Dead of Summer. But why would you deny yourself that pleasure?
SUMMER IS ALMOST OVER—FOR PETE'S SAKE HURRY UP!
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