Miss Marple for a Darker Time

Brianna Labuskes, A Familiar Sight (Dr. Gretchen White, Book 1)

Whenever the Boston PD can’t solve a mystery, they contact Dr. Gretchen White, behavioral psychologist and amateur sleuth. Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Dr. White, who mostly goes by “Gretchen,” asks the questions the fuzz isn’t allowed to ask. Unlike Miss Marple, Gretchen is a clinical psychopath, and may have killed someone twenty-five years ago. This means the Boston PD needs Gretchen, but they don’t trust her.

Brianna Labuskes’ sixth novel, and first series title, ties me in knots as a reviewer. It’s fast-paced, cinematic, and establishes a mind puzzle so intricate, I felt myself swept along. But Labuskes also trafficks in genre and regional clichés that drive me bananas. Repeatedly, I found myself so enrapt by Labuskes’ writing that I forgot myself and vanished into the book, then she dropped some banality so glaring, I jolted back to reality with whiplash.

Attorney Lena Booker left Gretchen an enigmatic voicemail before dying, in an apparent accidental overdose. But Gretchen refuses to believe her tightly wound friend (one of Gretchen’s few real friends) did something so careless as die accidentally. She persuades her PD handler, Detective Patrick Shaughnessy, to postpone a final ruling until she gathers every loose end. Shaughnessy agrees, provided Gretchen lets his partner, Det. Lauren Marconi, ride along.

Start right there. Labuskes names her police characters “Patrick Shaughnessy” and “Lauren Marconi,” about the most formulaically ethnic names you could give Boston characters. Shaughnessy is fat, ugly, and ill-tempered, a vintage Irish Policeman burnout character. Marconi is described as attractive, but makes herself as sexless as possible for professionalism’s sake. She reads like a Law & Order casting call notification. Major low-hanging fruit.

Gretchen zips through Boston with Marconi in tow, in her shiny, sleek Porsche, a metaphor for Gretchen’s hastily mobile mind. The late Lena Booker’s final case involved Reed Kent, a bereaved husband whose clinically psychopathic tweenage daughter stands accused of stabbing her mother, Reed’s wife, to death. But Gretchen discovers the case goes deeper. Lena, Reed, and Tess Murphy were thick as thieves twenty years ago… until Tess mysteriously vanished overnight.

Thus, Gretchen and Marconi vanish down a rabbit hole of overlapping mysteries. Solving Lena’s death means solving Claire Kent’s murder, which requires solving Tess Murphy’s disappearance. These difficult cases get compounded when Tess’s brother, a Congressman running for reelection, and Reed’s sister, a nurse specializing in troubled youth, both stonewall the investigation. Seems everyone has something to hide, including Lena, whose secrets remain locked even in death.

Brianna Labuskes

If this sounds Byzantine, don’t feel intimidated. Labuskes spins these cantilevered mysteries out through short, mostly dialog-driven scenes, where characters lie or disclose, slinging accusations at others or defending themselves. Labuskes, and her viewpoint characters, don’t indulge in philosophical maundering or long soliloquies. Gretchen, holder of multiple advanced degrees, sometimes pauses to explain complex concepts, but she always keeps it short.

Sometimes in reviews, I contrast “fully realized characters” with “authorial sock puppets.” By this I mean characters who have complex, nuanced motivations, versus those who do what the author’s outline requires. Reading Labuskes, I realize this is false. All characters, no matter how refined, exist entirely in the author’s head. Labuskes lets her characters feel as realized as she requires, while signposting that this is a story, a human-made contrivance, written by a person.

This comes across most directly in alternating chapters. In odd-numbered chapters, we see the present investigation unfold through Gretchen’s detached, analytical eyes. As both a psychologist and a psychopath, two groups famous for reading people, Gretchen spots lies and small details. Indeed, she sometimes comes across as a mind-reader. Because she is, indeed, the author’s narrative device, and someone needs to explain her finer points in plain English.

In even-numbered chapters, Reed Kent’s backstory unfolds in reverse. We watch him gradually realize he’s an unreliable narrator in his own life, possibly even a villain, whose stunted emotions drive people away. Thing is, as two mysteries unravel in Gretchen’s chapters, they become more constrictive in Reed’s. He knows the truth about Claire’s murder, and Tess Murphy’s disappearance, but he can’t tell us, because he can’t admit it to himself.

How you receive Labuskes’ story depends on the expectations you bring into the reading. Like a Hollywood thriller, she presents a tightly constructed, fast-moving narrative, where every character and action proves ultimately relevant. Like an Agatha Christie mystery, this story is remarkably bloodless and sexless (occasional vulgarity). Yet it’s also complex, even if the psychology is underdeveloped. It’s a new take on the time-honored thriller form.