Denver author Francine Mathews just might be the state’s most versatile novelist. She launched her career years ago with the four-book Merry Folger mystery series, set in Nantucket. Then she gave it up to write stand-alone and spy novels and the Jane Austen mystery series (under the name Stephanie Barron.) Now after a 19-year hiatus, Mathews returns with her fifth Merry Folger book. Most authors write with one voice, but Mathews writes in three. She facilely skips from hard-edge writing to 19th century English to New England jargon.
Mathews picked up the Nantucket series again after Soho Press approached her about reissuing the early mysteries — and adding a fifth — in ebook as well as print format. After a two-decade lapse, Detective Folger is still in her mid-30s, since Mathews has rewritten the first four books to give them a contemporary setting. (Mystery writers have the option of creating ageless characters caught in time warps, however. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, for instance, is a young woman stuck in the 1980s, although after two-dozen books, she ought to be on Social Security.)
In “Death on Nantucket,” a woman’s body is found on the widow’s walk of an old island mansion, where it has lain for a month. She is identified as Nora, the adopted Hmong daughter of Spenser Murphy, who owns the house. Once an investigative journalist known for his coverage of the Vietnam War, Murphy is famous for a book he wrote about his escape from Laos, a tale that was made into a movie. He now suffers from dementia.
Merry’s father has retired as retired as head of the Nantucket police department, replaced by a hard-nosed outsider, and Merry, third-generation on the force, is told she is expected to solve the death in a matter of hours. She quickly discovers that Nora died from cyanide poisoning — from a mixture of apricot pits and coffee. But was the death accidental, was it suicide — or was it murder?
There is no shortage of suspects. Murphy has two sons who are much older than Nora — Elliott, who is about to marry his gay lover, Andre, and Elliot’s dour brother, David. Both want the Nantucket house, called Step Above, as well as their father’s fortune. David’s newly divorced, and his former wife, Kate, is also a suspect, along with their daughter, Laney. Even the Murphy housekeeper is not free from suspicion.
At first, it’s not clear to Merry that Nora’s death is really murder. Then Murphy is found dead at the bottom of the long stairway leading to his house. His head is bashed in — and not from the fall. So Merry has two deaths on her hands, and one of them definitely is the work of a killer. Delving into Murphy’s past, Merry discovers Nora was actually his love child. Moreover, Nora, a journalist herself, had discovered that Murphy’s reputation was based on lies. Merry can’t help wonder if Murphy’s dementia was an act and that he murdered Nora to keep her from exposing his secret. But then that doesn’t explain Murphy’s own death.
David is a jerk, and you want him to be the culprit, but Mathews sows doubts, and you lurch from one character to another as Merry uncovers secrets about each.
Mathews is a story teller, and as with her other books, she has a fine sense of time and place. Her descriptions of Nantucket make you taste the salt air, and the drawl of the long-time residents puts you on the island. Nantucket is to the Merry Folger series what England is to Mathews’ Jane Austen mysteries.
