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Helen Black Mysteries #1
Murder by the Book
Christmas in Berkeley is grim for Helen Black, Private Investigator. Clients are scarce and her lover doesn't like Helen's new career. Then Helen lands her first important case: a wealthy lesbian whose lover is a murder suspect. Pat Welch's first novel.
240 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1990
33 people want to read
About the author
Pat Welch
23 books2 followersPat Welch was born in Japan in 1957. After returning to the US she grew up in an assortment of small towns in the south until her family relocated to Florida. She has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since 1986.
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June 18, 2020Okay, here it is again.
Q: Why do we need to run our books through professional editors?
A: Because if we don’t, our books suck.
In this case, it’s not the whole book, just the particulars of the crime. In the second chapter of the book our protagonist, P.I. Helen Black, is having a bank robbery/murder scene described to her by her friend in the police. He mentions a coat and shoes, but tells us (or her) nothing about them. I read the passages several times without making head nor tail of them. Yet they seemed to mean a great deal to Helen. Sure enough, the coat and shoes show up at the end as the only way to trace the murderer. It is like Pat Welch got to the end of the book and realized that Helen had no way to solve the crime so she went back and wrote in the coat and shoes. Yet no one checked her work for either clarity or plausibility—and it’s almost impossibly implausible.
Not a good beginning.—or ending. Which is too bad, because the rest of the book is readable. Helen is an ex-police officer in the San Francisco area. She is just starting up her private investigation business, so when a wealthy lesbian socialite comes to her for help, she sees it as her first real chance to succeed in the business. Her characters are not bad, although Helen’s relationship with her lover Frieda is fraught with spats about Helen’s safety and irresponsibility. She is another protagonist who is unable to let go, unable to express what they really feel, who presents a hard exterior, ad infinitum. But I can’t fault her without faulting the dozens of other protagonists who have almost exactly the same problems and relationships. Like Carol Ashton/Sybil Quade, for instance or Kate Delafield/Aimie Grant. I can go on and on.
So really, there’s not much else to say about this book, good or bad. We really don’t learn new things, there is no historical interest, and the characters don’t jump off the page. Without the poor beginning and ending, I would call this book exactly average or mediocre; with them it is maybe two stars.
Maybe the real mystery (and there always is one) is why she titled the novel Murder by the Book. The only book mentioned is a ledger, and it plays only vaguely into the plot.
Oh well, it’s Pat Welch’s first novel; maybe the others are more mature and well thought out. I have scanned the blurbs of the other books in the Helen Welch series and have found that Helen goes through times of trouble and turmoil. She changes partners and locations several times. She even goes to prison. A gritty and humorless saga that would be nice to go through completely, given time. But the book’s publisher, Naiad, prided themselves on having professional editors, despite their being a small, independent press. Not so here. Pat Welch needed guidance and better copyediting. It’s too bad that Murder by the Book was allowed to be published without them.
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.
Q: Why do we need to run our books through professional editors?
A: Because if we don’t, our books suck.
In this case, it’s not the whole book, just the particulars of the crime. In the second chapter of the book our protagonist, P.I. Helen Black, is having a bank robbery/murder scene described to her by her friend in the police. He mentions a coat and shoes, but tells us (or her) nothing about them. I read the passages several times without making head nor tail of them. Yet they seemed to mean a great deal to Helen. Sure enough, the coat and shoes show up at the end as the only way to trace the murderer. It is like Pat Welch got to the end of the book and realized that Helen had no way to solve the crime so she went back and wrote in the coat and shoes. Yet no one checked her work for either clarity or plausibility—and it’s almost impossibly implausible.
Not a good beginning.—or ending. Which is too bad, because the rest of the book is readable. Helen is an ex-police officer in the San Francisco area. She is just starting up her private investigation business, so when a wealthy lesbian socialite comes to her for help, she sees it as her first real chance to succeed in the business. Her characters are not bad, although Helen’s relationship with her lover Frieda is fraught with spats about Helen’s safety and irresponsibility. She is another protagonist who is unable to let go, unable to express what they really feel, who presents a hard exterior, ad infinitum. But I can’t fault her without faulting the dozens of other protagonists who have almost exactly the same problems and relationships. Like Carol Ashton/Sybil Quade, for instance or Kate Delafield/Aimie Grant. I can go on and on.
So really, there’s not much else to say about this book, good or bad. We really don’t learn new things, there is no historical interest, and the characters don’t jump off the page. Without the poor beginning and ending, I would call this book exactly average or mediocre; with them it is maybe two stars.
Maybe the real mystery (and there always is one) is why she titled the novel Murder by the Book. The only book mentioned is a ledger, and it plays only vaguely into the plot.
Oh well, it’s Pat Welch’s first novel; maybe the others are more mature and well thought out. I have scanned the blurbs of the other books in the Helen Welch series and have found that Helen goes through times of trouble and turmoil. She changes partners and locations several times. She even goes to prison. A gritty and humorless saga that would be nice to go through completely, given time. But the book’s publisher, Naiad, prided themselves on having professional editors, despite their being a small, independent press. Not so here. Pat Welch needed guidance and better copyediting. It’s too bad that Murder by the Book was allowed to be published without them.
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.
December 31, 2015
1.5 stars: So many characters with similar names and so much about them that the protagonist gets lost in the shuffle for large portions of the book, which turns out, when she reappears, to be something of a blessing. Plus the crime is just... uninteresting. Lots of place-based details, though. Not a series for me.
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