Charleston Red
By Sarah Galchus
Savage Press
$11.95
Reviewed by Mike Nardine
Original Review in The Reader Weekly
Charleston Red. The book’s title might be a reference to the blood shed by the murderer in this mystery novel written by a local physician and set in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina; or it might only be referring to the bright flame colored drawing rooms of anti-bellum mansions in an older, fabled, Charleston. Or it might be both. In any case, it’s an apt title on several levels because there’s plenty of blood and plenty of local color in this book.
The chief protagonist is Laura Lindross, a successful New York mystery novelist spending the winter in Charleston working on her next novel when—shades of Murder, She Wrote and a thousand others—horrible things happen to her friends and acquaintances (I’m not trying to be dismissive here, merely informative; these mystery novels are a genre unto themselves, with lots and lots of avid readers who are less interested in original plots than vividly rendered locales and interesting characters).
In this case, the mystery writer’s friend is a Charleston physician whose architect husband comes to a bloody end. And, as is required in this genre, her friend is immediately suspect. Charleston, South Carolina is the locale: and man-oh-man, is it vividly rendered. “By seven-thirty I was downtown at the new Metropolitan store on King Street, browsing…I spent a lot of money, I’m afraid.” She smiled and indicated a large moss-colored chenille afghan, bottle green martini glasses, several beautiful silver picture frames and a hanging lamp blown of opaque amber-colored glass and decorated with wrought-iron detail…
Perhaps it is this very same visual intensity that helps bring about this mystery’s biggest fault—its lack of mysteriousness. There is certainly no reason to have everything done in the dark like a cheap television thriller in order to build a sense of dread and suspense, but every object (building, car, clothes, you name it) in Charleston Red reflects light so clearly and brightly as to do away with any sense of impending evil in spite of the novel’s multiple violent murders.
The action and the characters interact in an upper middleclass Charleston (maybe even upper class), a world of wealth, privilege, and empty hours and days probably unfamiliar to most of the novel’s readers—and maybe all the more interesting as a result. Anyway, the local police are unable to find the killer; the clues point more and more toward the New York novelist’s physician friend. Then, after a series of violent deaths that pretty much leave the city of Charleston without anyone to design buildings, novelist Laura steps in to do her own bit of sleuthing and finally discover the murderer (sound familiar?). But believe me, because of the false leads and cleverly slanted clues you won’t guess the murderer’s identity until the very end. Which leads us to our next complaint: point of view.
Occasionally the reader loses track of the character. We think we are viewing the world through one character’s eyes when actually we are in another’s. This causes us to stumble off the path of the willing suspension of disbelief that is so important to fiction as we backtrack looking for clues to our identity. In addition, although the reader often finds himself in the killer’s mind, when the moment of truth arrives and the murderer is brought to justice, we are surprised to discover that this character in whose mind we have been traveling—indeed in whose identity for good or ill we have been sharing--has not been telling us everything. This leaves us feeling a bit betrayed by the author (I’m not trying to promulgate a rule here, just share a feeling). You can purchase this book at Amazon.Com or Savage Press.