Slacks for Ella Funt

Columbus Day is one of my favorite holidays because I get it off from work, but not very many other people do, so there aren’t ever any plans. It’s a free day. This year, E and I took a zipcar and went to NJ to get out of the city and to do a corn maze. When we planned this, we thought it would be fall then, and we’d wander through the corn maze in sweaters, enjoying the crisp fall air. Instead, it was 85° and humid, so we were hot, sweaty, and tired by the time we emerged from the maze after 2 hours of wandering around inside it.

In general, I am much more a fan of McDermid’s stand alone books than her Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series. A Place of Execution is one of the most riveting mysteries I’ve ever read. And The Distant Echo is also a very strong mystery. The series is pretty generic serial killer stuff, with particularly disturbing torture scenes. So I was interested in The Grave Tattoo, since it’s a stand alone.
In this book, Jane Gresham, a Wordsworth scholar, is searching for a lost Wordsworth poem. Unfortunately, McDermid gets caught up in the historical story, as well as numerous side stories. While the plot line about Tenille, Jane’s teenage neighbor in the projects, kept my attention, some of the other subplots weren’t that interesting. And the mystery plot-line was almost nonexistent. It just wasn’t a page turner.

This series has gotten incredibly tiresome and this is definitely the last one I’m reading. These books have always been pretty navel-gazing, but I think they used to be funnier. In this one, Jessica’s boyfriend Marcus, whom she has yearned for and agonized over during the first three books, proposes to her. Over a week, she considers his proposal with lots of melodramatic whining. It’s obnoxious and irritating.

I saw this on a best underrated mysteries list somewhere and requested it at the library. I think it’s out of print—I got the last copy in the entire NYPL system, which always amuses me. Luckily for anyone else who might want to read it, I returned it and it’s still available.
This isn’t much of a mystery. Solving the crime never seems very interesting or very complicated. What it does have is lots of romping about Oxford. Which I am always amused by, my interest in old English universities being very similar to my fascination with British boarding school. So that was good fun, but I definitely wouldn’t consider this a great mystery.