A Field of Darkness
by Cornelia Reed
Published by Mysterious Press
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Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart
Cornelia Reed's debut novel, A Field of Darkness, is a cross between social commentary and murder mystery. Her new girl sleuth, Madeline Dare, is a beleaguered blend of the innocence of Nancy Drew tossed with a tad of Susan McBride's debutante dropout, Andrea Kendricks. The foul language, which I think is supposed to be smart, sassy, and funny, is grossly overdone and gets in the way.
The time is 1988. Madeline comes from old money. However as Maddie says, "her money is so old there is none left." Her father has moved to California to smoke pot on a Malibu beach while her mother marries some sort of a wealthy guy but they live on pork and beans and week-old coleslaw.
Banished from the family estate, Maddie has married Dean (who's gone a lot, working in Canada and when he is home, he's an inventor) and is living in the god-forsaken upstate Syracuse. She hates the rundown town, as it is a constant reminder of her rundown assets.
A feature writer for a local paper, Maddie stumbles into a double-decades-old unsolved murder in which two girls were found in a cornfield with their throats cut so deep "you could see bone." Maddie starts nosing into the crime when her father-in-law unearths a set of dog tags in the field, which just happen to belong to her favorite cousin Lapthorne.
Determined to prove her indecently wealthy and so-sexy-she-wants-to-sleep-with-him cousin cannot possibly be the murderer, Maddie begins to get nosy, and well, readers can pretty much figure out what happens from there.
A Field of Darkness is a worthy read if only to count the cultural references and see how Reed uses them. Howver, as a murder mystery, there are no twists, turns, or surprises.
Armchair Interviews says: For a mystery, the red herrings are obvious and the results leave readers with answers to questions that were never posed.