Moving On Up Is dangerous

In Easier To Kill, the fifth novel in Wesley’s Tamara Hayle series, a black woman survives rape by her foster father and teenage prostitution to become a famous radio host of her own show. But she can’t completely escape her past.

Mandy Magic, the famous host of a nighttime radio talk show, hires Tamara to find out who sent her a note with the words “Movin’ On Up” written on it. She received the note shortly after her cousin Tyrone Mason was stabbed to death in a city park frequented by gay men. The words are the title to the theme song of the 1970s TV show “The Jeffersons.”

A few days later, Mandy’s office manager and best friend since grammar school Pauline Reese is strangled to death. We are not told what is in the second not Mandy receives after Pauline’s death. The next victim is Kenton Daniels, III whom Mandy hired as a consultant. He, like Tyrone, is stabbed to death. Although the two men were stabbed and Pauline was strangled, Tamara believes the three murders are connected and that the connection lies in Mandy Magic’s past. Mandy doesn’t receive a note after Kenton’s death, suggesting maybe the killer is getting closer to her. She doesn’t want Tamara to investigate or talk to the police about the murders. She insists that Tamara confine her investigation to finding out who sent the notes.

Thinking about the murders and the words “Movin’ On Up,” Tamara believes the killer, in killing people close to Mandy, is moving on up to finally go after her. Thus, she fears 18-year-old Taniqua, Mandy’s adopted daughter, might be next while at the same time she considers her a possible suspect (telling you why would be a spoiler).

Tamara becomes frustrated with the case because she feels Mandy is keeping a secret from her. Mandy refuses to talk about her past and insists that Tamara not involve the police. Tamara’s frustration boils over, and when she confronts her uncooperative client and insists she tell her the truth, Mandy fires her. As Tamara leaves, she sees a man enter the house and follows him in expecting the worse. The confrontation between the man and Mandy reveals her secret. After learning the truth Tamara suffers a bout of deep depression. She admired Mandy and considered her a survivor because she moved on up from working as a teen prostitute to become the famous host of her own radio show.

EAISER TO KILL is short, only 193 pages, but the crisp, conversational prose maintains the easy flowing pace and the suspense from start to finish. The tension builds slowly and is not relieved until the very last page when the identity of the killer is revealed. The story of a woman surviving her soul draining past and becoming famous is both uplifting and depressing (though I’m not sure Wesley meant it to be uplifting or depressing). You’ll have to read it to find out why, after the revelation of Mandy’s secret, Tamara goes into deep depression.

Paying a Dead Brother's Debt

In the three novels I've read in Valerie Wesley Wilson's Tamara Hayle series, memories of her dead brother Johnny haunts Tamara. She struggles with forgiving him for committing suicide when she was in her teens. In the fourth novel, "No Hiding Place" she feels she must pay a debt she considers he owes to a man whom he mentored when the man was a boy.

Tamara reluctantly takes a murder case when Bessie Raymond visits her office and asks her to find out who killed her son Shawn Raymond. Tamara tries to explain that solving murders is the job of the police. Bessie refuses to take no for an answer and asks how much it’ll cost for two weeks of work on the case.

As the interview progresses, Tamara recognizes Miss Raymond who had lived in the same neighborhood as her family. The recognition triggers a memory of the young boy her brother Johnny mentored as part of “Project Touch and Change.” That young boy was Shawn Raymond. The relationship ended when Johnny killed himself. Not only did his death leave Tamara without a big brother, it also left the young boy without a mentor. She feels Johnny failed her and the young boy. Had he lived maybe Shawn Raymond would have had a better life and still be alive. She feels Johnny owes a debt to Bessie because in committing suicide he failed her son. She takes the case because Johnny “had always been a man who paid his debts” and now she must pay the debt for him. Besides, she needs the money.

Bessie admits Shawn Raymond was a drug dealer and gunrunner. From the police investigator, Tamara learns Shawn was shoot through the heart with a .38, and the gun hasn’t been found. The investigator suspects a rival might have killed him.

Bessie also said Shawn fathered two children. One is a 13-year-old boy named Rayshawn Rudell whose mother is Viola Rudell, a small woman with a reputation for violence. The other is a baby boy whose mother is Gina Lennox, one of the twin daughters of retired policeman Gus Lennox.

As Tamara continues what she considers to be a futile investigation, she gets involved with the Lennoxs, a middle class black family that remained in the South Ward when other black residents left. Gus is a local celebrity. He was the first black policeman to go undercover. He gained his reputation of as a good, tough policeman after bringing down the Prince Street Gang while working undercover. He has two brothers, Zeke, who spent time in jail, and the youngest Ben, with whom Tamara had an affair after she divorced her husband DeWayne. The two remaining relatives are his wife Mattie and his twin daughters Gina and Lena.

Shawn had an affair with both daughters. Lena, the rebellious daughter, moved on after introducing her sister Gina to Shawn. Shawn abused Gina and forced her to perform horrific and humiliating sexual acts. Since the Lennoxs hated Shawn and prevented Bessie from seeing her grandbaby, Augustus Lennox Raymond, Tamara considered all members of the family suspects, including mousy Gina. Viola Rudell is a suspect because she felt Shawn betrayed her when he took up with the Lennox sisters. The killing of Gina as she exits her car in front of the Lennox home eliminates her as a suspect and complicates Tamara’s theory of the case.

After she considers the three elements of solving a murder—motive, method, and opportunity—Tamara focuses on opportunity. About a fourth of the way into the novel, I guessed who was the killer and the motive. I continued reading because I wanted to see how Tamara would break the seemingly airtight alibi of the person she believed killed Shawn.

Facing A Ghost of The Past

Barbara Neely's accidental detective, Blanche White, whom we met in Blanche On The Lam, the first novel in Barbara Neely’s series, has come full circle in the fourth and apparently last novel of the series.

  

For eight years Blanche has been trying to move past the time a white man, the son of one of her customers, raped her. She feels like she is in a game of Monopoly stuck at Go. To get over the trauma of being raped, she has to find a way to pass GO. Her return to Farleigh, North Carolina to help her childhood friend Ardell run a catering business and possibly become a partner presents her the opportunity to exact revenge on the rapist.

She flees in fear the first time she sees at one of the functions they cater David Palmer, the man who raped her. Nevertheless, she becomes obessessed with finding a way to hurt him financially and socially. The opportunity to search for dirt on him presents itself when Archibald, the attorney for the family she worked for and almost got killed in Blanche On The Lam, hires her. The remaining family member, Mumsfield, who has downs syndrome, is engaged to marry David’s sister Karen Palmer. Archibald thinks she is only after Mumsfield’s money. He asks Blanche to find out all she can about Karen.

Our amateur detective turned professional without a license spends most of her time searching dirt on David Palmer. Her efforts leads to her possibly involvement in the investigation of the murder of a young white woman, Maybelle Jenkins, and puts her life in danger. She receives a threatening phone call, a rock is thrown through the window of Miz Alice, the name of the house in which she lives, and a pickup truck runs her off the road near her house.

Over half way into Blanche Passes Go, the narrator announces the theme of the novel: "She added her mother to the circle of bruised women that included Blanche herself, her neighbor across the street, poor dead Maybelle, Daisy, even Ardell...." This theme of abused women and their reactions to abuse is suggested rather than explicit in the tightly controlled plot that has an I-didn’t-see-that-coming twist.

Examining the reactions of women in abusive relationships, Neely doesn’t preach, doesn’t step in as the author, but allows the message to come through dialogues that Blanche has with other women. Blanche’s romance with Thelvin, a conductor on Amtrak, who is a jealous man but also a good man, proves that not all men are dogs who abuse women.

Blanche Passes Go is the best of the four novels in the series. I felt from the beginning that it was the last one, and that the other novels were preparation for this final, well-constructed story. Its only fault is the descriptions of food preparation make it a little longer than it need be.

I think, like me, you’ll miss the professional maid turned amateur detective.