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rsadelleWith Child is the third Kate Martinelli mystery. Given my experience with the last two, I saved this one for a Saturday morning when I could sit down and read the whole thing in one go without staying up past my bedtime.
The book picks up some time after To Play the Fool, and like she did with that book, King does a fantastic job of making us feel like there are lives lived between the books while also only catching us up on the important parts, and doing so over the course of the book instead of as an infodump somewhere at the beginning. The book opens with Kate being woken up by knocking at her door. She answers it to find Jules on her doorstep. We met Jules in A Grave Talent when Al Hawkin interviews her mother Jani. By the time With Child opens, Al and Jani are engaged and Kate's partner Lee has gone off to spend some time with her long-lost aunt in Washington. Jules comes to Kate because she befriended Dio, a homeless teenager who lived in the park, and he has now disappeared. Jules wants Kate to find him. Kate agrees, and the first mystery in the book is what happened to Dio. Over the course of the book, Kate and Jules become friends. When Kate does find Dio, she gets hit over the head hard enough that she ends up in the hospital and on medical leave for a while afterward. One of her symptoms is that she gets headaches, but she has already agreed to watch Jules while Al and Jani go on their honeymoon. She has also, with their agreement, decided to take Jules on a road trip to visit Lee. While on the trip, she gets a headache and they stop for the night. When Kate wakes up the next morning, Jules has disappeared. This is the second mystery in the book, although it does, of course, twine closely with the first.
This book was both a good book and a good mystery. I figured out what happened and why before Kate did, which I tell you not to brag about my own powers of deduction but to make the point that it is possible to figure out what happened and why, which wasn't true of To Play the Fool. Unlike the other two books, the mystery in this one did not hinge on a ring falling out of a car. There is still a fascination with people who are special in some way - Jules is quite precocious (the book flap says she's twelve, but she read more like fourteen to me) - but I thought it was softened a bit, and I'm completely willing to accept the precocious teenager variation on the theme.
I continue to enjoy that these books do have exactly what I want from lesbian fiction: characters who happen to be lesbians. Kate and Lee are having relationship problems, but none of it has anything to do with the fact that they're both women. It's all situational, in a way that would still be true if one of them were a man. There is one plot point that hinges on Kate's lesbianism - because she's a lesbian who now rides a motorcycle who's been seen about with Jules, some people think she might have had something to do with her disappearance - but the text makes it clear (in a non-didactic way) that this is a point that hinges on bigoted stereotypes, not on reality.
The book picks up some time after To Play the Fool, and like she did with that book, King does a fantastic job of making us feel like there are lives lived between the books while also only catching us up on the important parts, and doing so over the course of the book instead of as an infodump somewhere at the beginning. The book opens with Kate being woken up by knocking at her door. She answers it to find Jules on her doorstep. We met Jules in A Grave Talent when Al Hawkin interviews her mother Jani. By the time With Child opens, Al and Jani are engaged and Kate's partner Lee has gone off to spend some time with her long-lost aunt in Washington. Jules comes to Kate because she befriended Dio, a homeless teenager who lived in the park, and he has now disappeared. Jules wants Kate to find him. Kate agrees, and the first mystery in the book is what happened to Dio. Over the course of the book, Kate and Jules become friends. When Kate does find Dio, she gets hit over the head hard enough that she ends up in the hospital and on medical leave for a while afterward. One of her symptoms is that she gets headaches, but she has already agreed to watch Jules while Al and Jani go on their honeymoon. She has also, with their agreement, decided to take Jules on a road trip to visit Lee. While on the trip, she gets a headache and they stop for the night. When Kate wakes up the next morning, Jules has disappeared. This is the second mystery in the book, although it does, of course, twine closely with the first.
This book was both a good book and a good mystery. I figured out what happened and why before Kate did, which I tell you not to brag about my own powers of deduction but to make the point that it is possible to figure out what happened and why, which wasn't true of To Play the Fool. Unlike the other two books, the mystery in this one did not hinge on a ring falling out of a car. There is still a fascination with people who are special in some way - Jules is quite precocious (the book flap says she's twelve, but she read more like fourteen to me) - but I thought it was softened a bit, and I'm completely willing to accept the precocious teenager variation on the theme.
I continue to enjoy that these books do have exactly what I want from lesbian fiction: characters who happen to be lesbians. Kate and Lee are having relationship problems, but none of it has anything to do with the fact that they're both women. It's all situational, in a way that would still be true if one of them were a man. There is one plot point that hinges on Kate's lesbianism - because she's a lesbian who now rides a motorcycle who's been seen about with Jules, some people think she might have had something to do with her disappearance - but the text makes it clear (in a non-didactic way) that this is a point that hinges on bigoted stereotypes, not on reality.