O'Brien's Desk: An Historical Mystery

Rating:
Summary: Interesting subject, never quite comes to life
Review: O'Brien's Desk is about a judge in 1923 Toledo who gets married at the age of 59 and then suffers a nervous collapse, and the attempts of his assistant and confidante in the family law courts to find out what the cause of the collapse is and how she can protect him from ever having it happen again. It sells itself as a detective story, but in many ways it's dramatised research. The judge was a real judge; the author is the wife of his real-life grandson; she has a PhD in American Literature and knows what it is to poke around in architves; she was given a set of mysterious scrapbooks by the judge's daughter, her mother-in-law, who thought she'd be interested in them. And it turned out that hidden inside the scrapbook was a real mystery.

The book has a lot of strengths. It's a minutely detailed study of Toledo at the time, as modernizing forces that were at work in the nation at large played out on the local stage. It's always interesting to be reminded that social change, particularly in America, happens one local judgement at a time rather than coming from a single nationwide decision. It is filled with people who are alive in their time, who aren't looking over their shoulders aware that they're in a period novel. See Topsy Turvy for an example in film of what I'm thinking of, though Topsy Turvy I think achieved it even better. In fact, probably the best analogy is with Steven Saylor's early Roman Empire mystery books, which are likewise based on true stories and on exhaustive research.

The weaknesses: really, the book is weighed down by all that research. You can't read it without realising that everything in it was painstakingly found out. A caricatured exchange from the book would have one character saying "You came on the streetcar, then?" and the other replying "Yes, thank goodness there weren't any delays like there have been on other nights this week due to power failures or, on one occasion, a pram on the line." The detail is a huge bonus, but it weighs the book down; essentially, everyone in it is a researcher and they debate the things they research, but actual living, breathing messiness never comes in to bring it to life. (For example, the judge's wife, 30 years younger than him, is a peripheral figure; didn't she care about what was happening? Was there no tension between her and the older woman who'd known him for so much longer and seemed to take such an interest in him?) It's valuable as condensed insight into local politics in the 1920s, and it's interesting family history; but it reads, fairly or unfairly, as too in thrall to the source material, and as such it just isn't quite enough fun.

Rating:
Summary: A thrilling, suspense-filled, and vibrantly told novel
Review: Set in the 1920's, O'Brien's Desk is a historical mystery based on true events. When one of Ohio's most well-known judges fathers his first and only child, a blackmailer precipitates a chain of events resulting in the judge's near-fatal breakdown. The judge's most trusted friend and colleague, Sarah Kaufman, must unravel the clues behind the machinations. Confronted at every turn by polarized forces ranging from progressive reform vs. political corruption to racial tolerance set against sanctioned bigotry, she learns that the secret of the judge's success lay in balancing and compromising between these forces... a role that eventually made him a target, and now she is next. A thrilling, suspense-filled, and vibrantly told novel.

Rating:
Summary: Thrilling Historical Mystery
Review: This is a brilliantly crafted mystery. I stayed up late a couple nights reading this, because it was so hard to put down. Russell weaves a tale so amazing that I was bound to the book until I was finished. Hopefully she will follow up to this book with another. What is almost as impressive as the story itself is the fact that this book was meticulously researched, and historically accurate. The element of truth in this novel makes it all the more compelling. I highly recommend it.