The Abnormal Gumshoe by Tamar Anolic
The Fayetteville Series, Book 2
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Romance, Contemporary
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by AstilbeChloe Weaver is the oldest daughter in a conservative Christian family of Fayetteville, Arkansas who lives biblically: long skirts for the women, home-schooling for the children, weekly church attendance and old-fashioned courting rules that lead to marriage.
As she turns thirty and remains unmarried, however, Chloe begins to wonder if she’ll ever have the happy marriage and many kids that she has been led to believe constitutes the perfect life. When her parents allow her to court Barnabas Anderson, Chloe knows she should be ecstatic. Instead, she is uncomfortable with the twelve-year age gap between her and Barnabas. Besides, Barnabas has always been a little… weird.
When Barnabas’ brother visits the Weavers, bringing tales of Barnabas’ previous wife and her untimely death, Chloe realizes how little she knows about Barnabas. As she prepares for a prayer assembly in San Francisco, where Barnabas used to live, Chloe decides to investigate his past and his wife’s death. With the help of Detective Logan Cartwright of the San Francisco Police Department, Chloe steps out of her comfort zone to find the truth- and find hope for her future.
What’s done in the dark will always be brought into the light eventually.
Chloe’s character development seemed weak at first, but after thinking about it I have come to the conclusion that this could very well have been done intentionally in order to show how emotionally and socially stunted she was as the result of growing up as the eldest child in a large family, being homeschooled, and otherwise being sheltered from the outside world. Having known a few kind but also quite naive people who grew up in similar Quiverfull households, so many of her mannerisms and habits reminded me of them from the parental role she took on for her fourteen siblings to the joy she felt when doing perfectly ordinary things like going out to dinner or ordering a coffee from a cafe. Kudos to the author for not only portraying this subculture pretty accurately but also for trusting the audience to pick up on the clues and understand why Chloe felt kind of flat in the beginning.
Another round of editing would have helped to clean up the typos in this novel. While all of them were mild errors that did not interfere with my understanding of the storyline, they happened often enough that I felt compelled to mention it in my review and refrain from giving this the higher rating I would have otherwise happily chosen for it.
The mystery was straightforward and, to be honest, felt rather realistic when it came to the authorities not always paying attention to the clues before them or knowing the right questions to ask when interviewing someone who lives a very different lifestyle than their own. Being a police officer does not automatically mean someone understands the nuances of every subculture or can easily pick up on small signs that something has gone terribly wrong in a case even if they are genuinely trying to understand, after all!
The Abnormal Gumshoe has piqued my interest and made me want to read the rest of this series.
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