A Deadly Promise (A Dr. Margaret Demery Book) by Paula Harmon; Brilliant Protagonist Outshines Convoluted Plot

 

A Deadly Promise (A Dr. Margaret Demery Book) by Paula Harmon; Brilliant Protagonist Outshines Convoluted Plot

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Sometimes the plot is the best part of a mystery. Sometimes it's the murder victim, the suspect, or even the murderer. Other times, such as in the case with A Deadly Promise, a volume in Paula Harmon’s Dr. Margaret Demery series, it's the lead protagonist. In fact, the protagonist in this book is such a memorable character that she is easily the best part of an at times confusing and convoluted mystery.

In 1914, Amos Chalkley, a young man, dies shortly after pathologist Dr. Margaret Demery gives him directions to the War Office. It seems to be a robbery gone wrong, but Margaret doesn't think so especially after another man, Luther Byrd, dies close by in a similar manner. They both have similar symptoms of some unknown contagion. Margaret and her husband, intelligence operative, Inspector Fox Foxcroft investigate while there is talk of rebellion in Ireland and predictions of a great world war especially after Astro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie are assassinated.

Let's start with the good stuff. Dr. Margaret Demery is the type of independent strong willed female detective that occurs often in Historical Mysteries and with good reason. Not only are they often excellent detectives with adept observation skills, empathetic understanding of the people involved, and plucky persistent spirits that pursue justice to the end, but Readers get to see what life was like for women of that era.

 In many times, women were suppressed, marginalized, either treated as fragile objects or constant workhorses, and raised to be wives and mothers and that's it. These protagonists often counter these assumptions. Some have careers of their own or are independently wealthy. Even if they take traditional paths and don't earn a living as investigators, they are able to use those skills as amateurs. The approach that these authors take are often intentionally subversive, even Feminist, in how their protagonists are written.

That is especially noticeable with Dr. Margaret Demery. She is a respected pathologist in a time period when female doctors existed but were still held under intense scrutiny and suspicion. Pathology was not looked upon as a suitable field for women as it was believed that women were too fragile and vulnerable to look at and investigate a dead body but Margaret shows that she has the stomach for it. She also works with living patients as well and uses her studies in respiratory illnesses to deduce short and long term complications.

The book explores the rampant misogyny and sexism that is not only personally experienced by Margaret herself but by other women. One of the most intense chapters involves a suffrage march which quickly becomes violent. Even before the violence occurs, the marchers are insulted and mocked by men in the crowd. Some women say that they sneaked out or had to get their husband's permission to march. Even though Margaret is happily married to a man who is empathetic to their cause, her husband, Fox reads her the riot act for being involved in a potentially dangerous situation. His concern is duly noted but he can't resist infantilizing his wife and chastising her like a child incapable of her own agency.

A very important lead that occurs in the book is the institutionalization of Iris Byrd, the wife of Luther one of the murder victims. She was institutionalized by her husband before his death after a domestic dispute. It shows that many people in that time period could have someone committed to a mental hospital for the flimsiest reasons including arguing with family members. Some men, like Luther, and we later learn another character, did this to wives and female relatives as a display of dominance if they felt that they stepped out of line or defied authority. This is the kind of world which Margaret has to navigate through to learn the killer’s identity.

When the book focuses on Margaret's individual investigation in the central murders, the book succeeds. However, it falters when combining it with the larger international picture. There are various characters and situations thrown in that represent different topics of the time such as the Irish Rebellion and WWI, some of which only have a peripheral involvement in the actual murders. There is the reappearance of a former enemy of Fox’s whose involvement with this plot only makes things more confusing. Then there are the obligatory red herrings, false leads, and betrayals which only hinder the investigation and it becomes hard to remember who is who, what their motives were, and what they had to do with the central mystery. 

It seems as though Harmon had too many ideas for this volume. Instead of focusing on one specific plot angle, she threw them all in. The results are an overwhelming Mystery which contains far too many subjects to create a streamlined focused mystery. 

Sometimes that's a good approach to focus on both the political and personal struggles particularly in an important historical time period like the days before WWI, but they need to be evenly balanced instead of thrown together. It needs to deliver a case where this point and that point lead to a specific conclusion rather than create a situation where it is hard to remember who is who. 

A Deadly Promise is not a terrible historical mystery so much as one with great potential especially with its lead character. Margaret is definitely the brightest spot in this book that needs more focus.

BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder by Michael Bartos; Suspenseful Satire Flies Close to the Cuckoo’s Nest but Falls Flat

 

BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder by Michael Bartos; Suspenseful Satire Flies Close to the Cuckoo’s Nest but Falls Flat

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: For someone to be placed in a mental hospital, they would have to be considered a potential harm to themselves and others. For someone to want to be put in there, they would have to be even more mentally ill, an investigative reporter looking for a story, or both. Ashley Roper, one of the protagonists of Michael Bartos’ novel BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder is both and he has a story to investigate.

The Blakemore Anderson State Hospital (BASH) is the site of several controversies. Accused murderer, Burton Peale escaped from there. Another, Tyler Goode languished there. There are reports of drugs being unwisely distributed and potential mistreatment. It's not a pleasant place to be sent to but it is a potential story so Ashley, a reporter for the lifestyle newspaper, Charley Town, decides to investigate it. He will impersonate a patient there and find out what's going on. Unfortunately, he finds getting admitted is the easy part. It's surviving and getting out of this environment that's the hard part.

BASH is kind of a mixed bag with some parts that work and others that don't. Some subplots get introduced and threaten to turn the book into something else but peter out before they pose any real effect on the narrative. Burton Peale’s escape promises to be thrilling but most of the points produce very little suspense and are only recalled after the fact. 

There are hints of abuse and corruption from the upper levels but the results aren't shown in a way that shows any after effects towards the patients. Maybe, in a drive to be satiric, Bartos ignored the human interest element that in such an environment people would be suffering, people who are often unable to function in the outside world and are at the mercy of their caregivers.

The plot that works the best is Ashley's. He is someone who is looking for a good story. He gained prominence because of his first person articles detailing his service in Afghanistan. This article could give him some more relevance and bring some much needed publicity to Charley Town, which with the exception of Ashley's military themed articles, has a reputation of being mostly local news and light fluff.

There is some humor and suspense with the process in which Ashley gets himself committed and the lengths that his girlfriend and friends have to use to get him released. It almost gives a gaslighting quality towards the possibility that Ashley's investigation could have gotten him committed for the rest of his life, even having doubts whether he imagined the circumstances that brought him there and slipping into the insanity that he feigned.

It would have been much more interesting if BASH was written as a terrifying place that deserves to be exposed so we would be much more concerned about Ashley's time there but the potential activities are more subverted and less upfront. It mutes the trouble that Ashley has gotten into for trying to expose the corruption but does show his determination in trying to reveal it.

BASH could be a better book but it needs to have more care in putting the ideas together to make a decent work.

Classics Corner: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg; Disturbing But Memorable Novel About A Woman Struggling With Schizophrenia

Classics Corner: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg; Disturbing But Memorable Novel About A Woman Struggling With Schizophrenia




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: No this book has nothing to do with the classic country song of the same name by Lynn Anderson except sharing a title.

Instead I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, shows what happens when a highly creative person has schizophrenia. The hallucinatory world that they create in their mind could be a peaceful retreat one minute and a walking nightmare of frightening creatures and self-destruction, the next.

16-year-old Deborah Blau is being taken to a psychiatric hospital. She has hallucinations of a fantasy world of her creation called Yr and has lately been cutting herself in punishment because the Yrian creatures order her to. At first her parents are in denial. They are a typical suburban family. They worked hard to get to where they were and to avoid prejudice from their Antisemitic neighbors. This shouldn't happen to them. But it does and when Deborah keeps harming herself, they realize that they have no choice but to send her to the hospital.

The book is fascinating as we get into possibilities of the cause of Deborah's schizophrenia and why it began so early. After all schizophrenia doesn't usually begin until one reaches their late teens or early twenties. There are many probable causes such as an operation to remove a tumor from Deborah's brain, the family going through a period of poverty and having to live with a strict Old World grandfather, and a stint in summer camp where she was bullied by anti-Semitic campers and teachers. There wasn't one specific reason, but several.

Of course psychological studies marched past the book's 1962 published date and it's late 1940’s setting. We now realize that exterior situations may not be the only causes for psychiatric disorders. Sometimes it's neurological or genetic reasons that are the cause.

However, it is human nature to look for reasons and explanations behind the unexplained. Why would a bright talented young woman suddenly withdraw into herself and succumb to hallucinations? There must be a reason and Deborah, her family, and psychiatrist Dr. Fried are determined to find it.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden also shows how the mind of a schizophrenic works by using their delusions to protect oneself and create barriers and prohibitions from the outside world. It also shows the difference between creative imagination and psychological hallucination and delusion. Nowhere is this most prominent than in Deborah's brain creating Yr.

When she's a child, Yr is a place that she retreats to in times of comfort. She believes that the characters protect and love her. She created little interesting details like a language called Yrian and the world's separate time frame. She has a strong creative artistic mind that could write fantasy stories if properly used. However, when Yr takes on a sinister tone is when the depths of Deborah's mental illness reveals her private Paradise is instead a private Hell.

As she grows older, Deborah's delusions become more terrifying as Yrian characters threaten her with punishments as she cuts and burns herself to acquiesce to their rages. This shows that while there is nothing wrong with creating an imaginary world, what made Deborah's world a product of insanity is that they wanted to hurt her or rather her own fears and insecurities manifested themselves as beings to hurt her.

Fried helps her recognize the monsters found in Yr were created by her own psyche. For example, she reveals that one of the Yrian characters is actually a stand-in for Deborah's strict grandfather.

Since Deborah's fantasy life is such a large part of her mental illness, Fried has to help Deborah see through her delusions by using reality. Once, Deborah reveals that the Yrians are punishing her because she almost threw her baby sister out of a window. Dr. Fried uses simple logic to help her realize that since Deborah was five years old at the time, she could not have lifted the baby and opened the large heavy window by herself.

Above all, Deborah receives the courage to silence her hallucinations and to accept a world beyond them. In the psychiatric hospital, Deborah makes friends with other patients who also have mental illnesses such as one who believes that she is married to the abdicated King Edward. Deborah and the other patients call themselves “nuts” and “sickos” and mock the orderlies and patients who aren't as mentally ill as they are or worse than them.

However, they want lives outside the hospital. The patients look on with envy at Doris, a patient who left the hospital and started a new life. When Doris returns after a relapse, they react with fear that if that happened to her, it could happen to anyone. However, Deborah wants to recover to succeed when Doris did not.

When Deborah strives to recover, she has to take the good and bad of the real world around her. When she argues about a friend's punishment, Fried quotes the book's title and says that she never promised life would be perfect or fair. There will always be hardships, violence, and hatred. People will mess up and sometimes the wrong people will get in trouble.

The difference is that Deborah can choose to live in that world instead of one ruled by her mental illness and the fear it represents.

New Book Alert: The Fading of Kimberly by Kit Crumpton; Interesting Look at Early 20th Century Mental Health Care is Marred By Uneven Writing

Spoilers: Kit Crumpton's book The Fading of Kimberly works as an interesting look at mental health treatment in the early 20th century. It gives the Reader a strong sense of the world of psychiatric hospitals in which the slightly oddest behavior could have someone share the same hospital as a sadistic killer. A world where psychiatrists are not as fond of treating the mentally ill as they are of shocking them or cutting them open.


Unfortunately The Fading of Kimberly is marred by uneven writing in which character's motivations are unclear and plot threads are left dangling. These glaring flaws keep this from being a perfect book instead it is a good one which needs some tweaking.





Kimberly Weatherspoon is the spoiled pampered only daughter of Warren Weatgerspoon, a wealthy widower. She is a perfect example of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She is overly concerned with her appearance and receiving attention from others. Kimberly arranges parties and other events so she can be the center of attention. She also seeks romance from the most handsome and wealthiest men so they can laud praise and bestow gifts to her.





With that narcissism also comes an immaturity suggesting Borderline Personality Disorder. Kimberly has a hard time living with rejection as her fiancé, Edwin, learns the hard way. She catches him in an embrace with her father's secretary, Laverne, and shoots them both dead. The subsequent verdict has her declared guilty but her father's connections manage to have her declared legally insane and she is committed to a sanitarium.





Unfortunately, she is not alone during her time in Elgin State Hospital. Among the other patients is one Riley Nacht, a former astronomer with a connection to Kimberly. When Kimberly attended boarding school, Riley taught a session on star gazing to her class. During a field trip, Riley got a moment alone with Dorothy, one of Kimberly's classmates and murdered the young girl. Like Kimberly he too was declared legally insane and institutionalized.





The book is effective in describing people with mental illness and psychiatric disorders and the treatment towards them which pretty much amounted to little to no treatment at all. One thing the book shows is how difficult it is for people to live with such disorders and how difficult it is for the people around them. Kimberly is extremely self-involved to the point of being irritating to the other characters and the Reader, it is only until later that we learn that she had a childhood with a father who adored her but preferred to throw money and possessions at her rather than commit to any real parenting.





Kimberly grew with a strong sense of entitlement and very little self-control. This is shown prominently during her school years when she bribes classmates with gifts in lieu of friendships and is unable to form real attachments with them. Even after Dorothy is murdered and Kimberly is an eyewitness to the crime, she blocks out the murder and retreats further into herself and her own little world as if avoiding acknowledging the murder itself.





Kimberly's narcissism makes her a difficult person to live with as her engagement to Edwin shows. Edwin is certainly a fortune hunter that when Warren bribes him with money to leave his little girl and run, Edwin does not have much internal struggle as he goes for the long green and runs. However, Kimberly's demands and constant craves for attention wears on him, as well as her lack of concern about anything that isn't about her.

Kimberly's time in the Elvin State Hospital is the most interesting part as we are shown various treatments like cold bath and shock therapy that harm more than cure.

There are also psychologists who  use guess work in diagnosing patients such as giving ones like Riley free reign to see how he works. This proves to be a big problem as one of the orderlies, himself troubled, befriends Riley to the point where he uses his advice to molest female patients in their sleep. One character is given a lobotomy and is heartbreakingly reduced to a shell of their former self.

Crumpton clearly knows a lot about the early years of the mental health profession since she researched it for a non-fiction book, The Fading of Lloyd about her great uncle who died in a psychiatric hospital. But her fiction writing needs work.

The opening in which it is suggested that Kimberly might be the reincarnation of Anne Boleyn is interesting but out of place in a book that doesn't deal with the supernatural in the rest of the book.  It is out of place and is more filler than anything else.

While Kimberly's back story helps us understand her, its placement in the middle of the book is a detriment. The Reader is subjected to several chapters of her acting spoiled and irritating so that by the time they learn about why she is the way she is, they may not care. It would be better to tell the story chronologically to give us the girl before the narcissist.

There are some odd things towards the end. The final moments between Riley, his orderly, and Kimberly is anticlimactic and involves circumstances that don't even directly involve them. Some revelations between Warren and his butler are thrown in at the last minute that should have been revealed earlier (and certainly would have spared this Reader from thinking entirely different.)

As a book about mental health, The Fading of Kimberly stands out. As a novel, it kind of fades away.