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Desert Reunion (Dante & Jazz Mystery 3)
By Michael Craft
Questover Press, 2024
Five stars

Each mystery in this three-books-so-far series offers us an engaging take on the death-in-a-luxury-rental theme. It’s a perfect scenario for this unique American resort spot: affluent, possibly self-indulgent, folks arrive in the desert, settle into a beautiful modern house, and then something goes terribly wrong. The crimes all unreel before our eyes with a kind of stately progress. Maybe stately isn’t quite right (after all, it’s not Downton Abbey); but there is a precision to Michael Craft’s storytelling that allows you to breathe, to consider the facts, and to study the characters as they play their assigned roles. Even if his characters rush about, Craft’s action never feels frenzied.

Dante is a concierge for a luxury rental agency, his job giving him access to the nicest houses and the most interesting clients. Jazz is a former police detective, working as a private eye (another great tradition). Once enemies, now friends, they help each other in personal ways as well as professional ones. Both of them have faced setbacks and recovered from them; now they seem solid, ready to face whatever life throws at them. It’s important that the personal side of Dante and Jazz’s overlapping lives is as significant in our enjoyment of Craft’s book as the mystery is.

Dante O’Donnell and Jazz Friendly aren’t the most likely detective duo, either. I can’t really imagine them as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot poking about St. Mary Mead, and yet I rather want to. The greater Palm Springs area, a glamorous miracle rising out of the western desert, is as mythical in its own way as the quaint English village in which so many dire things have happened in British detective fiction. Dante and Jazz are modern American avatars of a cherished literary type in England. Their stories come richly flavored with a sense of place, deeply immersed in a distinctive American locale that is unlike any other.

Craft’s careful, polished writing is not about page-turning or breathless anticipation. The narrative is both cinematic and thoughtful, laying out a big picture and then filling in details that bring the scenario to life. Dante’s new domesticity with his boyfriend Isandro is as important as Jazz’s evolving relationship with Wade Blade, a rising star in the contemporary art world. The fact that Jazz’s ex-husband Christopher and their daughter Emma are part of Dante’s life, too, says a great deal about the importance of community in this story. Both Dante and Jazz have found secure places in the world, and it gives them the confidence to approach even murder with equanimity.

The reunion of the book’s title is a fraught gathering of two long-estranged sides of an old California family, brought together by DNA testing. From the very beginning, the players in this drama defy expectations with their behavior, keeping both Dante and Jazz off-balance until the crime is uncovered. I suppose it is a cautionary tale in this age of newly-discovered family connections made possible by the dual siren songs of science and technology. Craft handles all of the moving parts of his novel with wry humor and a deft hand.

It is critical that the personal stories that make this series so special are not static. Even when the mystery is solved, our interest in this place and these people is not finished. We want to see them again, and to find out what happens next.