Guest Author - Deborah Markus
For my birthday, my husband -- who either thought I was kidding about all that Dante and Tolstoy on my wish list, or had decided that I needed a break from the heavy stuff -- gave me a copy of The Chocolate Cat Caper, a murder mystery by JoAnna Carl. It had an appealing cover, and was the perfect size for slipping into my purse. So, on days that I didn't feel up to lugging the most recent translation of War and Peace around, I tucked this into my purse for entertainment in waiting rooms or at the park.
I'm not a literary snoot. I like all kinds of books -- plain simple fun ones as well as literary heavyweights -- just like I like a simple bar of semisweet as much as some elaborate cacao creation.
So I enjoyed The Chocolate Cat Caper. I liked the story (your basic whodunit) and I appreciated the setting (a chocolate shop specializing in handmade creations).
JoAnna Carl manages to slip a lot of chocolate talk fairly smoothly into the plot. The chocolatier is the main character's aunt, and that main character, Lee McKinney, worked behind the counter of the shop as a teenager. So when she goes into some detail about truffles and bonbons -- why, for instance, "very good truffles can be made at home, but making good bonbons in a typical kitchen is a lot harder" -- it seems perfectly natural. And when she explains that "truffles are made from the inside out and bonbons are made from the outside in," the reader feels amused and educated, rather than having the sense that the writer is insisting on sharing every bit of the copious research she's done for her book.
I liked the main character and the premise of the book, too. Lee McKinney is attractive enough to have spent some time on the Texas beauty pageant circuit and married a very wealthy Texan, but she left all that behind -- the glamour, the money, the overbearing husband -- to live with her recently-widowed aunt and act as her business manager while studying to take her CPA exam. Lee finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery, and plays a part in solving it.
Lee doesn't swing instantly and expertly from civilian to detective -- she's caught up in events, and is doing her best, along with everyone else in the story, to make sense of them. This is a nice, realistic touch.
Less convincing are Carl's erratic attempts to give Lee a Dickensian "tell." Lee seems perfectly intelligent when we're introduced to her. She has a fine vocabulary, and good powers of observation. The book is told in the first person, and Lee first describes her aunt as looking like "a granite statue hewn by a sculptor who got tired of chiseling all the excess stone off a big block." She has a fine way with words, both in telling her story to the reader and conversing with her fellow characters.
But every now and then, Carl insists on giving Lee a propensity for saying the wrong word. It's not Tourette syndrome, and, in spite of Lee's rueful reference to her "malapropish tongue," these aren't true malapropisms. Mrs. Malaprop was blissfully unaware of her hilarious errors in speech; Lee is painfully cognizant of her own, and corrects them blushingly. But they come in bursts. She can go dozens of pages without a single slip of the tongue, and then suffer a cluster of them. It seems as if Lee is supposed to be afflicted by them most when she's in a difficult situation -- but in two particularly trying scenes, she speaks flawlessly.
It's true that a good writer should make her characters individuals, with quirks and oddities. But this isn't real character development. It's a quick, easy way of making a character noticeable and distinct that doesn't involve serious work. Its inherent unbelievability is heightened by the fact that at one point, Carl actually has another character suffer a similar slip of the tongue. Since this slip of the tongue just happens to give the main character some important information about the mystery, it feels more than ever as if the author forced this characteristic into the book for her own purposes. But it's an awkward, unsuccessful graft.
Fortunately, the rest of the book is pleasant reading. The mystery itself isn't too tricky, because although technically almost every character in the book could be a plausible suspect, Carl doesn't seem to have the heart to force us (or her main character) to wonder if all these seemingly nice people are just wonderful, nefarious actors. But there's something endearing about this wish to have the world be a (mostly) kindly place, filled with love and chocolate and second chances.
The Chocolate Cat Caper has scattered pages of chocolate trivia throughout the book. I have mixed feelings about them. They're enjoyable, but do have the effect of taking the reader away from the story (and reminding her that it is a story). The eight-question chocolate quiz at the end of the book was fun. My husband, son, and I all took it on my birthday morning. I'm pleased to report that I only missed one question.
