Point Deception
   Marcia Muller
  2001 Time Warner Books
    ISBN: 0892966904


It's the 13th Anniversary of a gruesome mass murder in a remote canyon along the Pacific coast & Sheriff's Deputy Rhoda Swift, who was first on the scene, is having nightmares again in her hometown of Signal Port.

Along the only coastal highway, Chrystal waits by her classic Mercedes at a turnout near the old driveway to Cascade Canyon, she's put the hood up in the time-honored distress signal. That day, however, the denizen of Signal Port are not stopping to help.

Guy Newberry, an investigative reporter, is one of the people who notices the young woman beside her car as he drives by. He doesn't stop because he's got places to see, a mystery to solve & a heart that's hurting from his wife's death. When he reaches Signal Port the first thing he notices is that it is a town in trouble & he's going to lay bare the reasons.

Deputy Rhoda Swift, in her official car, has also driven by the woman in distress on the way to answering another emergency call involving gunshots & she's bothered by that, particularly when, the next day, the Mercedes is still there with no sign of the driver.

Meanwhile among the natives of Signal Port tensions are building as the dreaded anniversary comes around. When a neighbor had called 911, the discovery of those two families, a stranger & a child up that lonely canyon road had terrified the town. Only one child walked away from the devastation, or so everyone thinks. Even with the intervention of the FBI, the case could not be solved. Blame was cast upon the rookie cop; she & her town has been frozen in a state of perpetual fear & misery. Even the tourists who do stop quickly sense something is wrong & stay over only briefly.

Marcia Muller populates Signal Port in fictional Soledad County on the California coast, with a cast of dysfunctional likable & unlikable characters. From a Vietnamese abalone poacher who's dating Deputy Sheriff Wayne Gilardi's sister to the hostile host of the Sea Stacks hotel. From the motherly dispatcher Valerie Middleton, who has secrets of her own & has been knitting away like a woman around the guillotine during the French Revolution; to the gay couple running a bed & breakfast that is on the verge of insolvency. From an aging couple living up in the countryside above the canyon who first heard the gunshots to a lone Basque descendant who saw much more than the FBI thought to wandering wives, accepting husbands & an impressionable cleaning woman-cum-waitress who's dating a secretive newcomer.

Deputy Rhoda Swift has a medically retired alcohol-soaked Sheriff's Deputy father with whom she squabbles whenever they meet because he blames her for her inept handling of that old case. She also has her mentor, Wayne Gilardi, for whom she has covered all those years ago & who has since deteriorated into a domestic batterer & a drunk.

So is set the scene for a fine mystery. Creepy canyons, hostile natives, festering memories, illegal shenanigans & flawed relationships with plenty of red herrings, some hair-raising detours complete with the last thoughts of a damsel in distress: a curious device which actually works out well.

Marcia Muller has kept the tension torqued -- keeps the reader turning the pages, wanting to find out how the folks of Signal Port got that way & how the mystery will unravel.

A gripping tale of despair & redemption expertly etched out of thin air.

More from Marcia Muller: Listen to the Silence; A Walk Through the Fire; While Other People Sleep; Both Ends of the Night; The Broken Promise Land; A Wild and Lonely Place; Till the Butchers Cut Him Down; Wolf in the Shadows; Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes; Where Echoes Live; Trophies and Dead Things; The Shape of Dread; There's Something in a Sunday; Eye of the Storm; There's Nothing To Be Afraid Of; Games to Keep the Dark Away; The Cheshire Cat's Eye; Ask the Cards A Question & Edwin of the Iron Shoes.
(10/07/01)

Rebecca