I felt
Carter wasted her talent in the semi-pornographic novel Walking
Bones. She
redeems her self in Jackson Park, in which she returns to the detective novel. This
time the amateur detective is not the New York street musician Nanette Hayes. She
is a smart mouth, wonderfully irritating, intelligent twenty-year-old freshman college
student in Chicago named Cassandra. She never knew her mother or father, and,
when her grandmother with whom she was living died, went to live with her grandaunt
and her husband in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
Cassandra,
Ivy, and Woody become amateur detectives when Clay Jackson from their old neighborhood
asks Woody to find his missing granddaughter Lavelle Jackson. Lavelle
disappeared during the riots following Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. She
was last seen rushing out of the corner grocery store where she had gone to buy
groceries for Clay. The owner found a high school ring among the groceries she
dropped and, after some persuasion, gives it up to Woody. After reading the
inscription on the inside of the ring, Woody decides to drop the case.
Cassandra,
however, feels Mr. Clay deserves to know what happened to Lavelle and insists
that Woody find her, or she will continue without his help. This naïve child doesn’t
understand that Woody is reluctant to continue the search because it might lead
to the family’s involvement in the investigation of the 20 year old murder of a
white school teacher and conflict with members of the Chicago police
department. She will also discover the involvement of some of her classmates in
a black militant organization called “Root.”
Cassandra
is an irritating, rebellious, intelligent 20 year old who, like most young
people her age, thinks she knows everything, and yet, she is wonderfully
fascinating. She describes herself: “I was ugly misshapen, red haired, and
walked with a light limp.” She also considers herself 20 pounds overweight. She
is the engine that keeps the rapidly moving plot rushing to an unexpected
ending, especially for her.
Oh
yes, Charlotte Carter, the real detective novelist, is back with a sort of
coming-of-age detective novel.
