Black Maria

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.

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What’s Black Maria About?

Detective Felix Kosmatka knows he shouldn’t think of this murder case being a launching pad for his career—his ticket out of the hometown where everyone of a certain age (including the police department’s receptionist) still uses an embarrassing nickname. But thinking about that does help distract him from a sight that threatens to make him lose his lunch.

The grandson of the region’s richest person has been found in his bed with his throat slit. There’s no sign of a break-in, nothing is missing, and everyone is accounted for (except for his father).

The grieving grandfather is prominent enough that a specialist from outside of area is brought into this small Pennsylvania mining town to help Felix. Detective Adam Shaffer wants to find the obvious answer, but Felix isn’t sure that Occam’s razor applies here and is determined to find something deeper.

In this former coal town, there’s plenty of deeper and darker places to go. By the time this investigation ends, everyone in the Department and everyone touched by the case will changed in one way or another.

My Other Post About the Book

Last Tuesday, I posted my thoughts about the book at about 100 pages in. In this post, I made some guesses about where I thought the book was going to go. It took less than 60 pages* for Boyer to prove me wrong. Very wrong about a lot of it—the kind of wrong where it might have felt like she was rubbing my nose in it, if I cared. Which I really didn’t—I was having too much fun reading the thing.

* I could tell you exact pages for both of these points, but I won’t to preserve a little bit of surprise.

Also, the formatting on the post was questionable and says a lot about the rush I was in to get it done on time. It’s actually more embarrassing than how wrong I was about the book (because it’s entirely my fault, and not because of a clever writer).

So…can I explain why I was wrong without giving much away? Not really—but I can say that I made the same mistake that both the detectives (and others) made.

So, what did I think about Black Maria?

There’s a lot that was impressive about this book—there’s a solid twist that derailed me, and some really well executed reveals throughout.

This is a police procedural where the whodunit isn’t that interesting (and is given away really quickly), the howdunit is pretty obvious (although the reasoning behind the how…), it’s all about the why and when. The how/if the killer gets caught comes in as a close second.

Boyer gets the people—the detectives, the killer, the victims, and the relatives of them all (and anyone else I didn’t mention). There are a lot of rich backstories at work here—we don’t get them all, we actually get very few of them. We get flashes of several others, just enough to tempt you, really. It feels like everyone tied to law enforcement (and more than a few others) could be part of a long-running series, and we only get to see them in this one installment. It’s a nice touch.

A lot of this novel wouldn’t work if it wasn’t told in the early 1970s, but I still wonder why that was important to Boyer to do. Did she start with an element of the story and/or a desire to tell something having to do with it, and then had go put the rest of the story there (and which element was that?). Or does she really just like that period of American/Pennsylvanian history? I don’t think it matters, but I’m curious.

I don’t know that except for the thing I alluded to in the previous section that I was ever blown away by the writing or the plot. But at every point, it was clear that Boyer was executing her vision exactly the right way. This is a solid piece of writing from someone I’d gladly pick up another book or three from. I might not be moved to rave about this book, but I will gladly recommend it widely. This is the way to do a historical mystery.

Disclaimer: I was provided a copy of this ARC by the publisher, without any expectation that I would post about it. My choice to do so, and what I chose to say are mine alone.