No New Leads

In a way, this book is most similar to Gaudy Night due to the fact that it takes a while for action to occur. The book is still interesting, but like in Gaudy Night there are “lulls” where no results are produced in the case. Right now, there are no new leads—Emanuel is still the primary suspect. The picture of a young man that the victim, Janet, had in her purse at the time she was murdered has still not been located. Instead, there have been more interrogations.

Kate reintroduced the academic setting by going to Janet’s dorm room, located in the Graduate Women’s Dormitory, and questioning her neighbors. However, although I thought this might be promising and bring in the academic aspect, so far it hasn’t since even her neighbors don’t know much about Janet. She was a solitary person who didn’t seem to have any friends. Even the girl who knows everybody’s business, Jackie, had little to say about Janet except that Janet carried a notebook all the time, was being analyzed (which the reader clearly already knows), and was once spotted with a man (whom she cannot remember the face of). While looking through Janet’s school records, Kate only developed more questions like why did Janet move to New York and why did her grades drop from A’s in college to B/B-‘s in grad school? Was something on Janet’s mind?

Aside from this, Kate has her niece’s fiancé Jerry on the case as well who is attempting to analyze the mystery from the male perspective and as an objective third party, which involves monitoring Emanuel’s movements (behind Kate’s back) to make sure he is indeed innocent. So far, all he discovered was that the porter’s suit was stolen when Janet’s room was broken into and that Emanuel does not seem to be the type to murder somebody.

Then again, it’s difficult for both Kate and Jerry to extract information because they are not real detectives and people won’t readily respond to their questions without knowing the reason they’re being asked. For this reason, they must casually lead into conversations and be cautious of how much they ask and how they ask it. This differs from Gaudy Night since, in that book, there wasn’t as much questioning and it didn’t have as much of a “detective aura” about it. For this reason, the sheer analytic approach in solving the murder seems to make this book academic.

An interesting thing I noticed about this book is that I have no perception of time while reading this novel. It seems modern. In Gaudy Night, due to the social customs of the 1920s and the obvious gender role differences, I was constantly reminded of the time period. This simply isn’t present in Cross’s novel. That’s what makes this mystery so interesting—it can apply to this time period. It could easily be the script for the next episode of CSI or Law and Order.