Valley of Ashes by Cornelia Read
New York ; Grand Central Publishing [2012]
Madeline Dare has traded New York's gritty streets for the tree-lined ‘burbs of Boulder, Colorado when her husband Dean lands a promising job. Now a full-time homemaker and mother to beautiful toddler twin girls, Madeline has achieved everything she thought she always wanted, but with her husband constantly on the road, she's fighting a losing battle against the Betty Friedan riptide of suburban/maternal exhaustion, angst, and sheer loneli-ness. A new freelance newspaper gig writing restaurant reviews helps her to get her mojo back, but Boulder isn't nearly as tranquil as it seems: there's a serial arsonist at large in the city. With the support of Jon McNally, her contact at the paper, and his friend, a fire inspector named Mimi Neff, Madeline joins in the case, while reporting on it.
None of these writing gigs is mentioned to Dean, since the state of their marriage is extremely precarious a structure. This doesn’t stop Dare from writing both her restaurant reviews and covering the increasing the number of fires popping up around Boulder. As she closes in on the culprit, the fires turn deadly -- and the stakes become tragically personal. She'll need every ounce of strength and courage she has to keep the flames from reaching her own doorstep, threatening all she holds most dear.
Madeline’s desire to ferret out the truth is an instinct not easily stamped down, but it can be swamped by the sheer overwhelming time commitment of juggling nearly single-handedly the responsibility of caring for twins in a town where she knows almost no one. While she was ecstatically happy at first, as exhaustion wears her down, she becomes dissatisfied. Her world has shrunk to an endless round of taking care of two demanding babies, a house that is never clean, and a husband who, when he is home, is more and more critical of her.
Getting to know people, however, doesn’t seem to be Dean’s problem; especially people of the female persuasion. Whether he’s out of town on a business trip or in the office working long hours, he’s drifting away. The only friend who keeps husband and wife together is Cary, who works at Dean’s office. After his death in one of the fires, Madeline discovers just how far Dean had strayed, and she finds herself in a fight, both for her life and the preservation of her family.
The mystery concerning the arsonist is an intriguing one, but this book is about so much more than arson. It's about motherhood and marriage, it's about friendship and tragedy and grief. It's about standing up for yourself and those you love. There are many things in life that can turn to ash within the blink of an eye. Madeline is a wonderful creation, strong yet vulnerable; smart, but sometimes completely clueless; opinionated, interesting and observant. Her story involves both love and the heartbreak of betrayal. She couldn’t be more real.
As Madeline struggles with all the issues of her life, the reader gets very emotionally involved. This sassy-mouthed woman with a big, big heart can make you cheer, laugh, and cry within the space of a very few sentences. This is beautifully-written, emotional, soul-searing and laugh-out-loud funny fiction at its very best.
What makes Read’s crime novels unique and difficult to pigeonhole, is the fact that the action doesn’t stop—and she doesn’t stop writing—when the murder is solved and the criminals are apprehended. Nor is everything tied up in tidy packages after the climax. That’s not how real life works, nor is it how satisfying fiction is supposed to work. And it’s definitely not how life has ever worked for Dare, whose whole world takes such a blow in this book that it’s hard to fathom how she’ll get up again. But, as readers of the series know from experience, she most certainly will, while eloquently telling off anyone who gets in her way! This is a funny and sad novel about a woman trying to establish an identity for herself and justice for everyone else. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Cornelia Read's voice is one of the most original, vivid and memorable in all of contemporary crime fiction. Highly recommended. ~ lss-r
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Library Book.
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