Maybe I’ve just overdosed on the period lately, but this particular mystery, by Jeanne Dams, left me completely cold. Try as I might, I just could not get interested in any of the characters presented in it. That’s a bit unusual, as I have generally liked her work (enough to locate signed firsts of her first three books, featuring Dorothy Martin).

The basic plot is is that the uncle of Hilda’s (for lack of a better term) boyfriend has disappeared, and the last reported sighting of him before he disappeared has him murdering his rival for election to the town council. Plot devices include liberal dosages of laudanum, prejudice against both sewedes and irish, con men, and the power of a family to make a murder investigation stop in its tracks.

Also the story steps upon one of my political peeves: democrat=Good, republican=Evil. For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been a republican. I simply believe that democrats are just as likely to abuse power as republicans (maybe that comes from growing up in the era of Richard Daly, but then again Boss Tweed was also a democrat, wasn’t he?) and I’m getting tired of novels portraying the one but not the other. One of my favorite lines from Rod McKuen (now if that doesn’t date me, I don’t know what does) went: “Black isn’t always beautiful, but any man who thinks it always ugly should be shown the ugly side of white.”

The period touches in the book simply serve to make the idea of a maidservant/detective all the more unbelievable. The plot itself might be good, I don’t know. It was hard for me to pay attention to it because the characters were so uninteresting. In fact I finished the book solely because I kept hoping for it to suddenly get better, I’d enjoyed her Dorothy Martin books enough to make me expect it would. It didn’t. It will be the last Hilda Johansson I read; life’s too short to waste it on unenjoyable books. Not recommended. If you want to read about the period, grab a US History text.