Ellen
Crosby came through
I’d read a couple of her Lucie Montgomery wine country mysteries – there are twelve, set in and around Virginia and DC, and wine-making is the underlying theme, the mysteries character-driven and on the edgy side of cozy; they steer away from graphic violence, but the consequences of that violence are full frontal.
This is true as well of Dodge and Burn, the fourth in the Sophie Medina series. Sophie’s a photographer, who’s spent time scouting war zones and natural disasters, and the fractures of domestic collapse. Her husband Nick was a CIA covert officer, murdered in the line of duty. Dodge and Burn, in fact, is more thriller than mystery, strictly speaking. There’s a killer unmasked at the end, but the story’s really about Sophie’s moral doubts, and a climate of shifting loyalties. There are moments when she’s in physical danger, yes, but the real danger is inward. Betrayal is corrosive; Sophie wants badly to trust, and her trust is too often treated carelessly.
Our tale begins with a dead guy out at Dulles airport, and his unclaimed baggage turns out to be a load of looted Ukrainian artifacts from behind Russian lines, ready for sale on the black market. Then there’s the noted collector and philanthropist with an icon of the Virgin of Vladimir in his basement safe, who invites Sophie to take some head shots, later found dead on the floor with Sophie’s camera tripod the murder weapon, and the icon gone, putting Sophie very much in the frame. And the half-brother Sophie never knew she had, a by-blow of her absent and long-dead dad, the brother a modern-day Robin Hood who steals back – wait for it – stolen black market artifacts, and he’s hot on the trail of the Virgin of Vladimir.
I’m giving you the hook, and a little extra. It’s worked out, more or less, but there’s a cloud of ambiguity at the end. Good is served, but at what price? Sophie’s left, to my mind, with an unsatisfactory resolution. It isn’t tied together neatly. Sophie questions herself, and she doesn’t come up with easy answers. At least she knows to ask.
I was struck by the notion of how a different writer might write a completely different story, in fact a completely different kind of story. We know the rule that you can only write your book, that it’s a book only you can write, so I’m in a sense comparing apples and oranges. But if you take the initial plot element of Dodge and Burn, not its theme, or execution, you may see it develop in other directions. If it were me, for instance, I’m pretty sure I would have leaned into the