The Butterfly Effect

Helen Keremos Mysteries #5

by Eve Zaremba

The fifth book in a highly successful series, The Butterfly Effect takes detective Helen Keremos to Japan. There she becomes involved in a complex series of crimes that have ramifications from the Far East to Europe and North America.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

332 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 1994

About the author

Eve Zaremba (1930–2025) was a Canadian mystery writer. She was active in the Women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s. She published several novels focusing on Helen Keremos, a private detective described as the first lesbian character in literary history to be the main character in an ongoing series of mystery novels.

Eve Zaremba was born in Poland and emigrated to Canada in 1952 after a stint in the UK. She graduated from University of Toronto in 1963.

Active in the Women's Liberation Movement in the seventies and eighties, Zaremba was a founding member of Broadside, A Feminist Review published in Toronto from 1978 to 1988. She has written articles and reviews in a number of other publications.

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen Keremos is one cool lady. Legit gets the girl every time and the mystery is always good. I do find it a bit odd that all the players in the mystery tend to just tell Helen everything she wants to know, but not enough to detract from the mystery. A ton of threads to follow but overall, an enjoyable read.

[Sheri Lutz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't want to meet whodunit in the last chapter; it's not sporting...

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made the mistake of reading this book first—it was the only one in the library. But in this, the fifth offering in the Helen Keremos mystery series, the author doesn't really have much left to pad the book with. In other words, we don't really find out much about Helen, other than she is a middle-aged lesbian P.I. with supreme confidence in her abilities and almost no fear. There's nothing wrong with this combination, but it's not much in itself. We rarely get a glimpse into Helen's psyche, her feelings, or her past.

In this one, Keremos is on her way to Hong Kong on business when she gets caught up in the murder of a Japanese Yakuza member who may have been involved in art forgeries so perfect that they are nearly impossible to detect. Pretty heady stuff for a start. But all the subsequent twists and turns are so difficult to follow that you might end up flipping to the end just to get it over with. I stayed with it, which may not have been a good idea.

The main premise—that someone has developed a method of making perfect forgeries of stolen paintings right down to the molecular level of the paint--is a new and unique concept to the genre, almost taking it into the realm of science fiction. Trouble is, we never learn who was doing these forgeries. In fact, from what we know about all the characters, none had the requisite knowledge to even attempt this, much less succeed at it. This is what I call a Fatal Flaw in a mystery—something that, no matter how good the rest of it is (and this one is none too good)—makes the novel as a whole a failure. Even the title is pretty off the mark.

I will probably go back and read some of the other books in this series, just because they are pioneering. This one I’ll give a 2.4. Not really bad, but certainly not recommended.

Note: This review is included in my book The Art of the Lesbian Mystery Novel, along with information on over 930 other lesbian mysteries by over 310 authors.

[sally · Rating 2 out of 5]

Soooo... I picked this up in a goodwill, assuming it was the famous Butterfly Effect. Now that I see three versions on goodreads, I suspect it is not. It's a mystery novel starring an older lesbian private investigator. Not a bad read, and I loved the change of main character from your average whodunnit. Not particularly good though.