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Three Sisters (Charlie Moon Mysteries) by James D. Doss
Book Summary InformationAuthor: James D. Doss Edition: Mass Market Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2008-09-30 ISBN: 0312945299 Number of pages: 400 Publisher: Minotaur Books
Book Reviews of Three Sisters (Charlie Moon Mysteries)Book Review: I Know You Are, But What Is Doss? Summary: 1 Stars
What to say about a book so bad, even Doss' fans don't like it? That's the surprise here, not the book itself which, in spite of all the claims to the contrary, isn't all that different from the others: a sophomoric "romp" with cardboard characters, leaden geek humor, and an undertone of sociopathy that really should start bothering people.
For Stone Butterfly, I skipped a rock over the text, hitting some of the more idiotic high points. For Three Sisters, let's try the opposite: Dropping a large rock of attention into the first fifty pages. Of course, that means I can't spend much time on the (even for Doss) incredibly stupid final pages, in which a 340-lb woman who grew up as a feral child and now roams the San Juans clad in a jumpsuit made of a grizzly skin (no doubt that of the last grizzly sighted in the San Juans, in 1979), carrying a Bowie knife, capable of defeating a black bear in mano-a-mano, and with a heart that goes pitty pat over bodice ripper romances figures unexpectedly. And I don't get to discuss the scene where Charlie carries a woman up to his bedroom in three or four pages of double entendres without a clue that she expects to get -- Oh well.
About the sociopathy: What else do you call it, when the heroes, Charlie Moon and Scott Parris, banter while standing over the corpse of a woman who has apparently been mauled and eaten by a bear (as they do, again and interminably, at the scenes of not one but two separate fatal car accidents)? And her sisters -- both of them -- when they arrive on the scene, pause to muse on what a delectable "big boy" Charlie is? And the sisters, the day after the death, argue over which of them should set her sights on marrying the recently widowed husband. By the way, the loving husband, while on the phone with his wife a moment before the death, mentions her sisters and then thinks to himself that he'd be happy to sleep with either of them. Given the sexual mores of Dossland, maybe he means "sleep." I dunno.
Doss doesn't seem to have any grasp of the realities of human feeling. How else explain his remarking that a man whose just had his teeth knocked out "blubbered over them like a little kid whose ice cream cone has gone splat" (Dead Soul, I think)? Or the restaurant owner (Shadow Man) who, upon noticing that one of his customers has just had her brains splattered on the walls by a sniper, hopes it won't hurt business (and a sheriff who, went confronted by this concern, sees nothing odd about it)? Or the endless cruelties and amusements of "Nah-Nah" finger pointing at Sarah Frank (Snake Dreams, for example)?
But back to the fifty pages. We have, not surprisingly, three sisters to observe. One of them, Astrid, is murdered by a bear while she is talking on the phone with her husband, who is horrified by the sound of the bear "smacking its lips" (Extra point question: What do bears have in common with chickens? They can't smack their lips. But never mind.). Astrid, it turns out, is the youngest sister. It takes Doss a little while to decide this, but it's settled by the time we get through those fifty pages. What's odd about it is that the second sister is named Beatrice and the eldest (put on your thinking caps now) is Cassandra. Now how would that work? I had a friend who named his kids alphabetically. He's up to Fred. He started with (do you see where we're going?) Adam. How did Joe Spencer know he was going to have three children, which foreknowledge allowed him to name his kids backwards? I know, if there had been a fourth, he could have started over with Zelda, but still....
When the sisters arrive at the scene of mayhem, moments after Charlie and Scott have found the wreckage of Astrid's body, Charlie stops them from entering and seeing their mutilated sister. "I'm sorry," he says. And to further illustrate Doss' apparent lack of grasp of human reality, Doss adds, "And he meant it." After all, he might, like Doss most of the time, not. And Bea, being told that she can't look at her sister's mangled corpse (ever seen a picture of a bear kill?), does what any proper Doss woman would do. She stamps her foot! Hard! She does not say, "You let us see! RIGHT NOW!!" I don't know how Doss missed that one. And it turns out that this moment is when she falls in love with Charlie (although it is before she marries Astrid's husband and then... but that's all out of range).
The night after Astrid is eaten, Bea, alone at her secluded mansion, which is apparently (as events will illustrate) not far from Astrid's secluded mansion, lets her two very nervous dogs loose. The German shepherds (named Ike and Spike) make a beeline for the trees and disappear for three hundred pages. Bea quite literally thinks nothing of it. Except to reflect that it's fine, really, because keeping dogs is no "bed of roses." Suffice it to say that the murder of Astrid and the disappearance of the dogs are, as anyone with more sense than a Doss' character would guess, connected.
A few pages later, Charlie stands on a rock in the nearby wilderness and is observed by a "hairy, foul-smelling creature" covered in blood and with hard, unblinking eyes. It says, "Hrghrn" or something like that, and Doss warns us (foreshadowing! foreshadowing!) that this "might be a term of endearment." Which should lead you to one absolutely confident surmise: Whatever it is, is female.
Finally, on page 50 (I promised), there is the matter of the strawberries. You see, the accepted wisdom is that Astrid was eating strawberries in bed, and a bear, driven mad by the desire for strawberries, broke into her house and had her for, well, dessert. Ok, maybe accepted "wisdom" is a stretch. Let's just say that it's the theory ascribed to by everyone with a right to a theory -- the medical examiner, the cops, the family, etc. Interestingly enough, what's wrong with the theory is not, as you might think, how incredibly unlikely it is that a bear would do this, but that... well, let's just say, as a mercy to the poor unfortunates who haven't treated themselves to the book yet and hate spoilers, that the likelihood that Astrid was eating strawberries turns out to be A CLUE. Never mind that it's a clue that everybody who knew Astrid would have known about and, conveniently, none recalled.
Ok, my fifty pages are up. I wish I could go on, but I'm busy clearing my palate with a real mystery novel (Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, highly recommended) before wading -- in cheap mud boots I'll throw away after -- into Snake Dreams. You've been warned.
Summary of Three Sisters (Charlie Moon Mysteries)All Charlie Moon wanted to do was enjoy a night of poker with his best friend and Granite Creek police chief Scott Parris. But that was before Scott?s dispatcher cut in with an emergency call. A man was on the phone with his wife when their call was interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream. Would Charlie and Scott mind checking it out? Arriving on the scene, they discover that the man?s wife, who is the daughter of a wealthy and influential rancher, has been mauled beyond recognition. Is this the work of a hungry bear? Or something far more sinister? The whole family?including the victim?s sister, a popular TV psychic who on that very night happened to ?see? a murder happen in real-time?is demanding answers. But if there?s one person who can solve the case, it?s Charlie?s aunt Daisy. She?s an aged Ute shaman whose investigative talents rely heavily on help from the spirit world. Can she see the truth?and help track down a killer?
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