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Helen Keremos Mysteries #3
Beyond Hope
In a deadly game of multinational terrorism, detective Helen Keremos searches for a long-lost 60s revolutionary who happens to be the daughter of a right-wing U.S. presidential candidate. The Keremos mysteries was one of the first lesbian detective series
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1987
3 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Eve Zaremba
18 books8 followersEve 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 26, 2019
I haven't read the previous entries in the Helen Keremos series, but I found this genuinely difficult to finish.
Keremos is far too good at her job: she is never caught by surprise, she correctly predicts every action of both her allies and her enemies, she knows every play in the book and calmly prepares her movements in advance to anticipate them. In short, she's a manic pixie dream detective.
Quite possibly this is the Virago/late 20th century angle of writing women: make them as good or better than the men, to make up for lost time. Which is interesting as a conscious writing/publishing decision, and I'd like to explore that further, but here it makes an already unbelievable story intensely boring.
The other real downside for me was the blatant setup of the plot. Readers of detective fiction are naturally familiar with the 'case starts out as one objective, morphs into another higher-stakes one, but the original objective is ultimately the clincher' method of plotting. It's engaging, it's effective, and the ubiquity doesn't tarnish your enjoyment.
But here the first objective is so obviously a foil (and not just because Helen, in her infinite detective wisdom, immediately spots it for such) that it would have been more honest and frankly more believable to just hire her to look into terrorist activity in the Canadian heartland from the get-go.
It took me way longer than it should have to finish this story, because the plot was so deadened by Helen's quiet logic that I could hardly make it through more than a couple of pages at a time.
Keremos is far too good at her job: she is never caught by surprise, she correctly predicts every action of both her allies and her enemies, she knows every play in the book and calmly prepares her movements in advance to anticipate them. In short, she's a manic pixie dream detective.
Quite possibly this is the Virago/late 20th century angle of writing women: make them as good or better than the men, to make up for lost time. Which is interesting as a conscious writing/publishing decision, and I'd like to explore that further, but here it makes an already unbelievable story intensely boring.
The other real downside for me was the blatant setup of the plot. Readers of detective fiction are naturally familiar with the 'case starts out as one objective, morphs into another higher-stakes one, but the original objective is ultimately the clincher' method of plotting. It's engaging, it's effective, and the ubiquity doesn't tarnish your enjoyment.
But here the first objective is so obviously a foil (and not just because Helen, in her infinite detective wisdom, immediately spots it for such) that it would have been more honest and frankly more believable to just hire her to look into terrorist activity in the Canadian heartland from the get-go.
It took me way longer than it should have to finish this story, because the plot was so deadened by Helen's quiet logic that I could hardly make it through more than a couple of pages at a time.
June 19, 2020
The third entry in the Helen Keremos series goes a step beyond the fine Work for a Million. Not only does Helen exceed her previous excellence as a detective, but the book has more excitement, danger, and history within its pages than the first and second novels put together.
The whole thing starts with $3,000 in cash and a request to find a woman who fled the U.S. twenty years before, after being involved a terrorist bombing. Helen’s only task is to give the woman a message from the clients. Seems standard enough fare, right? Her search takes her into a little-known area in the interior of British Columbia: the Kootenay Mountain district where three diverse cultures cautiously interact: The Dukhobors—Russian Christian emigrants—, native Americans, and “new people,” generally hippies who have fled—like Helen’s quarry—to Canada to escape punishment (or the draft) for anti-Vietnam war activities. Each section of the community plays an important role in Helen’s search.
But before she actually locates “Carol,” the assumed name of the woman she is being paid to find, she is befriended by two members of the Israeli secret police and accosted by American thugs—all of whom have their own reasons for wanting to find Carol. It seems that there is more going on in the Kootenays than Helen had suspected.
No point in going on with the plot outline, though; this is a very satisfying mystery/thriller in which Helen’s character is cemented as a no-nonsense detective with a sometimes dangerous penchant for following a case to the end. It is impossible not to like her. And it is impossible not to see the literary and historical importance of the women’s commune she locates—a farm where Carol once was forced to hide—and the solidarity of the commune’s inhabitants, who will protect each other at all costs.
As in the other Helen Keremos novels I have read, Beyond Hope is entirely self-sufficient. No characters from the previous novels show up, despite the fact that Helen and her previous client seemed to be heading for a romance at the end of Work for a Million. And for the third book in a row, Helen is fairly sexless. Although she mentions a previous romance with her friend Jessica Tsudaka—who helps her on this case—she does not have a romance, or even a flirtation, in this book. This lack of romance is a little disappointing since, after all she has done in the first three books, it seems like she deserves one. Another disappointment is the lack of backstory. In the last book there were brief glimpses into Helen’s past; she lived in the U.S. for several years with her uncle, for instance, and her mother was either a drunk, a prostitute, an addict, or maybe all three. I had hoped this would continue, but except for the brief mention of Helen’s history with Jessica, there was little reference to the past.
Still, the writing is solid, the mystery is multi-faceted, and Helen’s ability to suss out underlying motives is refreshing: “Having established to m y satisfaction that they were indeed trying to hide something I had to decide if it was worth uncovering. I had a pretty good idea what it was, of course.” And that’s where we get to one of the most interesting pars of the book. Helen solves the mystery, of course, but does she ever find the missing woman she was hired to find? She never says, but I think she does—woman’s solidarity to the end. Read the book and see if you agree. This should be rated somewhere between 4 and 4.7; good enough to get on my Top 25 list.
Note: I read want seems to be the first 1988 Amanita printing of this novel.
Another 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.
The whole thing starts with $3,000 in cash and a request to find a woman who fled the U.S. twenty years before, after being involved a terrorist bombing. Helen’s only task is to give the woman a message from the clients. Seems standard enough fare, right? Her search takes her into a little-known area in the interior of British Columbia: the Kootenay Mountain district where three diverse cultures cautiously interact: The Dukhobors—Russian Christian emigrants—, native Americans, and “new people,” generally hippies who have fled—like Helen’s quarry—to Canada to escape punishment (or the draft) for anti-Vietnam war activities. Each section of the community plays an important role in Helen’s search.
But before she actually locates “Carol,” the assumed name of the woman she is being paid to find, she is befriended by two members of the Israeli secret police and accosted by American thugs—all of whom have their own reasons for wanting to find Carol. It seems that there is more going on in the Kootenays than Helen had suspected.
No point in going on with the plot outline, though; this is a very satisfying mystery/thriller in which Helen’s character is cemented as a no-nonsense detective with a sometimes dangerous penchant for following a case to the end. It is impossible not to like her. And it is impossible not to see the literary and historical importance of the women’s commune she locates—a farm where Carol once was forced to hide—and the solidarity of the commune’s inhabitants, who will protect each other at all costs.
As in the other Helen Keremos novels I have read, Beyond Hope is entirely self-sufficient. No characters from the previous novels show up, despite the fact that Helen and her previous client seemed to be heading for a romance at the end of Work for a Million. And for the third book in a row, Helen is fairly sexless. Although she mentions a previous romance with her friend Jessica Tsudaka—who helps her on this case—she does not have a romance, or even a flirtation, in this book. This lack of romance is a little disappointing since, after all she has done in the first three books, it seems like she deserves one. Another disappointment is the lack of backstory. In the last book there were brief glimpses into Helen’s past; she lived in the U.S. for several years with her uncle, for instance, and her mother was either a drunk, a prostitute, an addict, or maybe all three. I had hoped this would continue, but except for the brief mention of Helen’s history with Jessica, there was little reference to the past.
Still, the writing is solid, the mystery is multi-faceted, and Helen’s ability to suss out underlying motives is refreshing: “Having established to m y satisfaction that they were indeed trying to hide something I had to decide if it was worth uncovering. I had a pretty good idea what it was, of course.” And that’s where we get to one of the most interesting pars of the book. Helen solves the mystery, of course, but does she ever find the missing woman she was hired to find? She never says, but I think she does—woman’s solidarity to the end. Read the book and see if you agree. This should be rated somewhere between 4 and 4.7; good enough to get on my Top 25 list.
Note: I read want seems to be the first 1988 Amanita printing of this novel.
Another 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.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews