(courtesy Tor Publishing Group)
The crime genre, early teenage voracious consumption of Agatha Christie’s entire output aside, has never really compelled this reviewer to sit down and read like, say science-fiction or slice-of-life quirky dramas.
While most sections of my favourite bookshops see regular footfall from me, the crime section never does; or rather never did because somewhere along the way, this reader, who loves quirk and sassy characters, and is even more delighted when they meet, discovered crime novels which owe as much to their characterisation, snappy dialogue, and left-of-centre world view as they do the mystery solving at their heart.
While some might, and do label it as cosy crime, and in lots of ways to be fair, it is, these novels, such as Love Bites by Cynthia St. Aubin, do a brilliant job of framing mysteries of any kind as essentially an attempt by people to make sense of the world when their ideas of what should and shouldn’t happen don’t follow th expected path.
Left to our own devices, we want the world to be safe and secure and to be loved and to love in return; no one wants people to die, and certainly not violently, and so when that does happen – granted, as history and current events show us, not all people possess a beating heart that mourns the shedding of blood – we want to make sense of it and we want justice to be done.
I skipped through the gallery and out to my old Mustang humming “We’re in the Money” as bottles of Belvedere and wedges of exotic cheese hopped like backup dancers on the stage of my naked greed.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I had forgotten to be sad.
Sadly, the world refuses to follow that rather understandably lovely script much of the time, and so we need books like Love Bites to see justice served and to have the world put back soundly and easily understandably back on its axis.
Love Bites does that of course but the delight of this enormously appealing novel is that it does it with gusto and sense of fun that while it gets to the needed and wanted finish line of justice and things mostly making sense, it does in ways that absolutely delight every step of the way.
Much of that delight can be happily slated home to the protagonist, Hanna Harvey, a recently-divorced art history grad student who needs to get herself a real paying job, and fast, to provide some semblance of a functioning life for her and her three cats.
That’s easier said than done but Hanna is not someone to simply lie down and let the world wantonly steamroll right over the top of her, and so when a job comes up at a gallery in town, owned by the fabulously rich, definitely hunky Mark Abernathy, she goes for it even if, ahem, her CV is not entirely fit for purpose.
In other words, when she has no experience and managing a gallery of enormously idiosyncratic artists and a boss who is as secretive as he is devastatingly muscular and handsome, is way beyond even the outer limits of her very limited career lived experience.
(courtesy official author page)
Happily, her gambit pays off, and as the back cover blurb describes it – I don’t usually borrow the words off the outside back cover but good lord, this is so perfect, it must be repeated – “soon her cheese budget is in the black and her feline life partners are no longer eyeing her like a six-foot can of Fancy Feast”.
Hanna is, in every conceivable way, the sassy, take-no-prisoners, dialogue straight from the mouth of the gods protagonist you want and need in a novel like this, and while Love Bites takes some fairly intense and darkly unnerving twists and turns where Hanna might herself end up as one of the victims if she’s not careful, Hanna is a wisecracking heroine who absolutely holds her own against some fairly formidable foes, and even some unnecessarily secretive allies.
She is a joy to read, and its her verve, wit and unwillingness to just lay down and die, pretty much literally as it turns out, that powers and gives fantastically immersive vivacity to Love Bites which has that snarky supernatural mystery you didn’t know you needed.
In fact, after reading the first novel in what is a series, now acquired by the mighty Tor Publishing Group, you will be glad that you met Hanna, that you have the great pleasure of spending time with her and that you are taken on what turns out to be a very wild ride to finding (most) of the truth.
And it’s a truth that will absolutely defy any and all expectations you might have about Love Bites.
The book slid from my hands and landed at my feet, sending a cloud of dust upward like a mini atomic bomb.
The floorboards creaked behind me. ‘Mrs. Kass” I said, turning.
I was wrong.
That’s the glorious thing about the novel.
While it badges itself quite openly as the first entry in a “supernatural mystery series” (there’s that back cover blurb again!), and so you know there’ll be heady dose of some form of the non-everyday, at least for us mere mortals, in the story, whatever Aubin does with that promise is a ton of reveal-heavy fun.
The mystery gets solved, oh absolutely it does, but what looks like a series of murdered women, all of whom had an unfortunate connection to Mark Abernathy – and the use of “unfortunate” does not mean what you might think it means – and a fairly standard police investigation, headed by the equally yummy homicide detective James Morrison (and yes, Hanna is attracted to him as much as Mark … what’s a girl to do? That’s part of the fun, my friends!) turns out to be nothing like you expect, and that is a very good thing indeed.
In fact, while Hanna is grappling with the very weird and strange new world in which she finds herself, and for the greater part she swims far more than she sinks (which, to be fair, doesn’t happen much), and sorting out who did what when and bloodily to whom, we are enjoying a murder mystery with quirk, heart and a vivacious sense of giddy fun that might go dark and serious, but which remembers that even in the heart of darkness, you need a protagonist with sass, verve and a never say die attitude who can see justice sense, the world righted (kind of) and wisecrack like crazy along the way.