Title: A Lesson in Murder
Author: Maya Wong
Date: 2023
Quote: "Alice...and Sarah...made a pretty good team."
Women as Best Friends Forever has been a popular motif in fiction for thirty or forty years now. Some people want to be different. Is Betrayal by a Best Friend from Childhood a fresh new motif? Meh. It could be part of a misogynist backlash.
Alice is Black and, apparently, an extrovert. Sarah is blonde and an introvert. Sarah's father and brother died when she was young; Alice's father filled part of the hole they left in Sarah's heart. Now he's been murdered, and Sarah's old friend Jacob, still single and attractive, comes back into her life as the police detective who's there to help solve the murder. Alice is too emotional to work with him. Sarah is not.
Jacob arrests a murderer...but whose? Did he really have a motive or an opportunity to murder Alice's father? If he didn't, then who did? And what happened to Sarah's father, anyway?
Meh. This novel is tersely written. I'm not saying it was written by a computer, but I am saying it lacks the strong narrative voice that would persuade publishers to read it in an historical era when efforts to market automatic "writing" (meaning plagiarism) computer programs, which are not intelligence, are making life more difficult than ever for writers.
It is not, as Wong claims, a cozy mystery. It's a clean mystery in the sense that Sarah doesn't have to look at bleeding wounds or deal with child molesters, but it's a grim, ugly story with a lot of murder victims even if we never see the murder victims "onstage."
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