The Dead Wives Society
by Sharon Duncan
Signet Mystery, 288 pages, paperback, 2003
An attractive, independent young-middle-aged female PI with something of a past? Sounds a bit like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, and the comparisons are sure to be made between Milhone and Sharon Duncan's Scotia MacKinnon, protagonist of The Dead Wives Society. The similarities don't stop with the setup: just as Milhone's adventures are (increasingly) undertaken against a sort of soap opera background woven from the relationships between her supporting characters and indeed from that between Milhone and her estranged family, so are MacKinnon's. Perhaps such comparisons are odious, but there are enough echoes of Grafton's work here that I kept expecting to be brought up short by one of Milhone's electric one-liners. No such luck.
Ex-cop Mackinnon, three husbands down and a rich boyfriend on call, lives on a boat in the San Juan Islands, Washington State. Surrounding her are folk like the guy on the next boat, Henry; ditzy Zelda, her part-time assistant downstairs; Abbie, ever looking for a good cause to demonstrate about; and local newspaper editor Jared. These and others are having their interpersonal ups and downs, into which MacKinnon is sometimes dragged. To add to the mix, MacKinnon's mother, elderly hippie Jewel Moon, arrives for a stay to have a heart-to-heart about the way she abandoned MacKinnon in infancy, so MacKinnon can realize she's been maybe a bit tough on Mom all these years.
MacKinnon's new client is sizzlingly glamorous French-Moroccan medic Chantal Rousseau, freshly arrived in town with her aged full-Moroccan mother. Rousseau has been swindled bigtime by one Forbes Cameron, who briefly married her, and wants at least her mother's jewelry back; placing Cameron's own family jewels in a blender is an eagerly sought optional bonus. As MacKinnon digs, she discovers Cameron, under various aliases, has perpetrated similar swindles on a whole string of women, some of whom have been – and are still being – bumped off.
But that's not all. It soon emerges Cameron is a rogue MI6 agent who a couple of years ago turned murderously traitor and is now on the run from ex-colleague Michael Farraday, despatched to terminate him. Even so, Cameron has a new rich female victim in his sights ... but who?
Implausibilities leap forth. Cameron knows his most recent ex is here but nonetheless plans a high-profile celebrity marriage in the locality. All his aliases have the same initials, FWC, a habit an MI6 agent might perhaps have grown out of. As MacKinnon puzzles over a pair of cufflinks, monogrammed with those initials, that Cameron forgot when ditching Rousseau, she on impulse shows them to Zelda, who just happens to recognize them instantly because she once shared a house with the jeweler who made them. And so on.
This is all told amiably enough, but it's hardly white-knuckle stuff. Further, the solution to the mystery element – who's the next unlucky bride? – is glaringly obvious to the reader about 100 pages before it is to MacKinnon. In sum, this is a book that seems to have no aspirations higher than to be a time-passer. One feels Duncan could try harder.
—Crescent Blues