Joan Livingston of Shelburne Falls has hit her stride in her second mystery novel featuring Isabel Long, a retired newspaperwoman who lives in a small western Massachusetts town.
In “Chasing the Case,” Isabel applied her reportorial skills to amateur detective work, solving the disappearance of a young woman almost three decades before the beginning of the story. In the new “Redneck’s Revenge,” Isabel decides that she wants to spend the next years of her life as a private investigator.
She learns that she must start by apprenticing herself to an established investigator and finds one with the unlikely but memorable name of Franklin Pierce. He doesn’t promise her a lot of money, but Isabel doesn’t mind. She thinks of her new career as “a paying hobby.”
Isabel is immediately approached with her first case as a fledgling P.I., the death of a junkyard dealer named Chet Waters three years earlier in a fire at his home.
Although the police, ruled his death accidental Chet’s daughter, Annette, is convinced that her father was murdered. Chet was a smoker, but Annette believes he was too savvy to cause a fire with his habit. She also knows that he had a habit of making enemies.
She provides Isabel with a list of possible suspects. These include the dead man’s own sons, his main local competitor in the junkyard business, a newcomer to town who wanted to shut down the junkyard, and two brothers known for drugs and violence.
The apprentice detective is helped in her investigation by her 92-year-old mother, Maria, and by a group of elderly men who hang out regularly at the local general store. They know pretty much everything that goes on in Isabel’s town and the surrounding area.
She is also helped in part and confused in part by two men in her life. She started dating the owner of the local bar months earlier during her first case. Their love life cooled significantly when she solved that case — but it seems to be catching fire once more. That romance becomes more complicated when Isabel is attracted to a new man who happens to dance very, very well.
Joan Livingston takes all these elements and turns them into an absorbing story. Chet, his daughter and the suspects in his murder emerge as complex and interesting characters.
Livingston’s present-tense, first-person narrative leads the reader through Isabel’s thought processes and keeps the action moving.
As I read “Redneck’s Revenge,” I solved the mystery of Chet’s murder (yes, it was a murder) just a little while before Isabel did. That’s pretty much the perfect outcome for a mystery lover. I look forward to this new private investigator’s next case.
Tinky Weisblat is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy,” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.