Here’s another book for the R.I.P challenge!
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Sometimes a wrong detail will bother me so much that it detracts from my enjoyment of a book. This happened from the beginning of The Edge of Dreams, from Bowen’s Molly Murphy series, when Bowen’s heroine Molly and her baby son are caught in a train accident and she cracks some ribs. The plot requires Molly to have someone else take care of her baby while she investigates crime—that’s the only obvious reason for this incident until late in the novel—so her husband, Daniel, asks his mother to help.
Bowen has evidently never had cracked ribs, though, or she might have picked some other ailment. My husband has, and he says it hurts so much that all you can do is lie there and cry. Although Molly remarks that it hurts to breathe, she clearly doesn’t understand what this means and gets out of bed almost immediately, begins calling on friends, and investigating crime. This mistake was irritating as the novel continues to mention Molly’s injury while she takes trains and travels all over New York City.
Daniel is investigating a series of crimes that at first are linked only by letters Daniel receives at the police department. In fact, some of the incidents had already been treated as accidental. But the killer promises to continue.
Molly is more interested in the case brought to her by her friends Gus and Sid. A young girl’s parents were burned to death, and she was found asleep outside with no memory of what happened or any sign of having been near the fire. An eager young police lieutenant thinks she killed her parents. She is having nightmares, and Gus thinks an alienist skilled in the interpretation of dreams can help her.
Predictably, the cases prove to be connected. I was well ahead of the book’s sleuths when it came to identifying the murderer, if not the murderer’s identity.
If you think I wasn’t exactly charmed by this mystery, you’d be right. Aside from a slew of rather flat characters, it has such a ridiculously unbelievable solution that I didn’t buy it at all.
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