A Grave Talent — Spoiler Free Book Review
Allow me to start this review by saying that I both like and love this book. I just like the story, which does not mean that I found the story middling. But I LOVED the writing in this novel. The real beauty of this book lies in its skillful prose and masterful structure.
First a bit of background. A Grave Talent is the first entry in the Kate Martinelli series by Laurie R King, and this novel won the “Best First Novel” Edgar Award in 1994. The story is set in early ’90s San Francisco and follows the series title character, Kate Martinelli, through the investigation of the murders of several young girls.
The book itself is divided into three parts, and the author leverages this structure to have the story span three different mystery sub-genres.
Part 1: The Road
The first part is a phycological thriller with overtones of the occult. The setting is quite moody in part one. Laurie R King weaves together the weather, the landscape, and the buildings in such a manner that the book imparts a very ominous and weighty sense to the reader.
This section of the overall story pivots around a massive winter storm that batters the greater San Francisco area. The author covers this storm in a beautiful two-and-a-half narrative timeline. Here is an excerpt from chapter 11:
At eleven o’clock… a huge area of the grid went abruptly black, and a thousand newcomers to Silicon Valley cursed and cracked their shins on the furniture as they searched blindly for flashlights and the stubs of Christmas candles. Old-timers just went to bed and told each other that it would be all over in the morning…
At one o’clock a homeless woman in an alleyway off Market Street died of exposure… winds gusted to nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the bridges across the Bay were shut down…
At two-thirty a redwood tree died. One of hundreds that went down that night… this one fell directly upstream of [a] juntion of road and creek, washed top-first downstream, and inserted itself like a cork into one culvert with its roots blocking the mouth of the second.
At three o’clock the pent up waters lifted the two four-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long iron drainage pipes like a couple of straws and hurled them downhill, madly gobbling up huge pieces of the road and hillside as it passed…
By five o’clock silence descended, broken only by the pervasive sound of running water…
Light seemed to come earlier than usual that morning, as if the sun were anxious to see what its clever child had accomplished during the night… The world took a shaky breath, grateful birds began to sing, and the sun rose in clear blue skies to give its blessing to this humbling of creation.
Part 2: The Past
Part two shifts from being a thriller to being standard police-procedural, like a novelization of a Law and Order episode. There is a good deal of sleuthing about, following clues, and meeting tertiary characters who each incrementally push the investigation forward.
What makes this section unique is that it weaves delivery of the characters’ backstories into the progression of the investigation. Dark and mysterious characters become familiar and welcoming. The point-of-view characters that the reader is meant to relate with begin to really resonate as we learn the history behind their characteristics.
All-in-all, this is nothing ground breaking — more a fundamental of storytelling. But it stands out and becomes more enjoyable due to the tonal shift that occurs in part two.
Part 3: The City
While there is still some sleuthing to part three of A Grave Talent sees the characters crafting and executing a plan to finally wrangle in the antagonist. The remaining procedural work for the story shifts away from the primary point-of-view character which causes this final section to read more like an elongated action sequence. The timeline narrative technique used to detail the progression of the storm in part one makes another appears in part three, and it is used so well that I was excited to see it comes up for a second time.
There is a plot twist at the end of this part that is given away by the length of the book; mid-way through part three it becomes obvious to the reader that the ending towards which the story is naturally building would take noticeably more than the remaining pages to play out. This is one of my only criticisms with the book (others will be omitted so as to not include any spoilers).
The Paintings
There are several facets of this book that prove the skill of the author; perhaps none moreso than her descriptions of the paintings produced by one of the main characters. King brings the paintings to life in the readers mind not by giving verbose descriptions of the images the paintings depict but rather by vividly describing the impacts that the paintings have on the viewer. At one point while reading I stopped, turned to my wife, and said “I feel like I can see these paintings with my soul, and they are gorgeous!”
Take this description of the painting Strawberry Fields for example:
It was a single figure of a man, a middle-aged Mexican farm worker, standing in the center of a vast field, row after row of strawberries, radiating endlessly, hypnotically, out from the horizon. He was leaning on a hoe, and the viewer’s eyes met his with a shock, for in his face and stance lay a total and uncomplaining acceptance of the miles of grueling work that lay around him and the knowledge that he would never finish, he could never really stop, would never get the dirt from under his fingernails or the ache from his back
Many painters would have left it at that, glad enough to disturb the wealthy elite who would see the work and for a few hours feel enobled by their guilt. [The artist], however, had gone one step further. As one studied the farm worker, the huge flat field, the hot blue sky, and came back to his face, gradually the feeling grew that this man was deeply, sublimely happy, in a way that someone with a choice could never be. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” came to mind, and Kate had left the gallery much shaken. Strawberries had never tasted quite the same ever sense.
Conclusion and Recommendation
Can I recommend this book? Yes.
It is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys mysteries, detective fiction, or perhaps even period/location peices, especially artists (note the previous section) and those who prefer their dramas to not have grim/dark or gore-y characteristics.
So, does this book remind you have any books that you have read? Have you read any other books written by Laurie R King or set in San Francisco? Drop a comment on this article if you have any thoughts or plan to add A Grave Talent to your bookcase soon.
