I'd been meaning to read the latest from Hank Phillippi Ryan, a prolific and award-winning author of thrillers, and finally got around to it after catching her session at the 5th Annual WD Online Mystery & Thriller conference. Trust Me has been nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel. I stopped at page 177. I probably should have been tipped off when I first put it down after the first chapter and didn't go back for three weeks. That isn't my usual way. But I had trouble buying into her protag, a woman who'd lost her husband and toddler daughter in a car accident over a year earlier and is still in the depths of grief is approached by her former editor to write a book about the trial of a woman accused of murdering her toddler daughter. Nevertheless, I plowed on. (Warning: Spoilers ahead) It is painfully obvious from the beginning that the accused is going to be acquitted (which is bad for the protag because without a conviction there is no book). So, no suspense, there. A few hints are laid that something more nefarious is afoot, but nothing comes of it (at least, not by p. 177). The acquittal rolls off the page like a dead fish, and just as we're wondering what the protag will do, her editor shows up at her house with the acquitted mother and claims that there can still be a book, but about the mother's redemption (at this point, I'm hanging on by a thread). The protag is agonizing over this, because she is still convinced the other woman is guilty as sin, when her editor drops the bomb: the woman has been the subject of death threats and an arson attack (on her attorney's home, where she was staying--another stab wound to my weakening credulity) and so suggests that the woman stay with the protag, which will allow them to work on the book together (p. 177). At that point, I took the book down to the little library my building keeps outside the laundry room in the basement. I'm offended. Not because Ms. Ryan is making money off of crap, but because it's apparently critically acclaimed crap. Or maybe it's because she has the rep, sort of the way people assume that every movie Bette Davis ever made was brilliant. I've read one of the other books up for the Best Contemporary Novel Agatha, Bruce Robert Coffin's Beyond the Truth, a legitimate page-turner with an air of authenticity from beginning to end. I can't say for sure if Coffin should win the Agatha, because I haven't read the other three nominees. But I know that Ryan shouldn't.
All I know is that it is never a good sign when the main inciting act is forced into fruition with a bit of plot gymnastics so the story has a reason to keep moving forward. Seems to be the bruised second banana to plot demands to move the story in the direction it needs to go. Sorry to say, but that is why I am very leery of modern established authors. They just get way too comfortable with the success and at some point they start slipping up.
I'm reading other books up for the Agatha, including one by Louise Penny, another established author in the genre. So far, Ryan is still in last place.
Happy ending. Trust Me did not win an Agatha. Ellen Byron's entertaining Mardi Gras Murder won Best Contemporary Novel. I think the recipes at the back helped.
What an interesting bit to base a novel on for it to win an award. Must have been one hell of a good collection of recipies.
