New Book Review: Garden of Lies

Title: Garden of Lies 

Author: Jemma Stark

Date: 2023

Publisher: Jemma Stark

Quote: "I frequented the arena. It was the only way to forget the terror."

FBI Agent Briana Song is the protagonist in a series of crime thrillers. Book One, Garden of Lies, shows the clear influence of the bestsellers this series is meant to be different from: Like Lord Peter Wimsey, Song is a shellshocked veteran whose nightmares (some narrated in the text) and cage fighting hobby reflect her struggle with the memory of being a decent human being on a battleground. Like Clarice Starling, she seems to border on asexuality because that's what her unattainable male working partner seems to need. Her partner, Agent Buckley, answers to "Buck"...and in this novel the murder victim has adult children called Rayford and Chloe and a partner called Steele! Minor characters are called Agent Castor and Agent Pollux, so we know that we're not meant to over-think the characters' name, but the echoes of Left Behind seemed particularly noticeable in a completely different genre.

Trigger warnings: lots of cross-gender violence, guns, knives, missiles, and a zombie nightmare. Plus points: strong traditional morality, believable plot, awareness of a modern woman's options. Song is as tough as any man, as strong as any man of her size and smarter than most. She can serve in combat. She can fight crime as a veteran. But she's still just a Daddy's Girl in a schoolish workplace where she spends a lot of time saying "Yes, sir" when scolded about what she does to survive. She still lives not with loneliness but with "the terror" of post-traumatic stress. She has enough motherly instincts to empathize with Steele's motherhood--and to understand why, in her chosen life, motherhood is not an option. If today's young women don't identify with the 1970s' kind of feminism, it may be that they can see that, although Song is likable, is liked, is well paid, she's not particularly "liberated." The burden of work  weighs on her as heavily as it weighed on her great-great-grandmother who scrubbed laundry on a washboard. Equality with men is a compromise women accept, knowing that men's careers are not necessarily what either men or women really want.

This novel is particularly recommended to women who were or are attracted to law enforcement.