Celadon
Review by Walter Cummins
Caitlin Mullen’s Please See Us received the Edgar first novel award in 2021. Whether Heather will follow with similar affirmation from mystery judges is still a question. But the award led me to wonder what makes a crime novel special in relation to literary fiction. Some significant writers of literary mysteries are Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kate Atkinson, and Graham Greene. While their plots revolve on a crime to be solved, their focus is on the people involved in the solving and, often, those who committed the crime, essentially the mystery as a starting point to explore human and moral complexities. While Heather offers multiple unknowns, its concern is also more about the effects of those unknowns on the people involved than on the answers to who did what.
Heather does start with a trope familiar in many recent mysteries—the detective returns to his or her roots in an official role that complicates the reception by old friends and acquaintances and perhaps enemies. These connections also guarantee that events of the past, often a distant past, will be inseparable from any recent crimes.
In Heather, the returning detective is thirty-year-old Callie Hauser, who after a few years as a drug agent in northern New Jersey, becomes the chief of police in her small Pine Barrens hometown. She had a connection with the retiring chief, her best friend’s father-in-law. That, along with her sex and her age, leads to a distancing and even hostility from the all-male squad, including the man who thought he should have been named to her position.
Callie’s initial act in the novel involves stopping an erratic car and discovering the driver she has to arrest is her estranged alcoholic mother, Jenna. That connection takes her back to a cold case of a dead newborn her then teenaged mother had discovered on the side of the road several decades ago. While others want a unsolved crime from long ago dropped as a waste of time, Callie digs in.
The novel had opened with a preface that describes a childbirth from the second-person perspective of the overjoyed mother and her reaction: “That downy hair, in the bright light, is a miracle.” How this birth of a welcome child relates to the story ahead remains an almost forgotten question for much of the telling.
While the dead baby from the past is the official mystery with police case status, many more additional mysteries emerge, each involving people of the town, past and present, with an overriding uncertainty as to whether if and how they are connected. While Callie is central to at least two—her now missing mother and DNA from an unknown man who is certainly her anonymous father—Mullen brings in the perspectives of other characters who, for much of the novel, Callie doesn’t even know exist, although they turn out to have crucial roles in the developing complexity of the central mystery.
Unlike the typical crime novel that follows the steps of a detective working toward a solution, Heather explores this group of people from different times and places and their links. That makes the novel about questions much deeper and more complex than just who was responsible for a dead newborn. The real subject is how one crime compounds to affect a chain of characters with emotional upheavals.
The chapters are titled with the name of the person whose perspective is being explored. The majority are from Callie and Annabelle, with several others from Blair. Eventually, their lives come together with a disturbing impact, shaken and transformed, along with the lives of a number of other characters who are in same way bound to the three. By the conclusion, a body is found, a murderer arrested, and Callie’s life threatened.
The novel doesn’t need that excessive threat. It’s a familiar happening of the thriller genre. Yet, overall, Heather satisfies with many characteristics of a literary mystery, especially its strong development of characters. Yet, it doesn’t go as far as, say, Dickens and Dostovesky who broaden their mysteries to make a statement about the human condition.
Throughout their engagement with the novel, readers probably are curious to find out when the title name, Heather, will come in. Not until the very end.
