Blue – Abigail Padgett

Blue McCarron is a thoroughly unconventional heroine – a lesbian social psychologist who doesn’t really like people, she retreated to an abandoned hotel in the middle of the California desert when the love of her life, the mysterious Mischa, vanished without warning from her life two years ago.
While swimming with her constant companion Brontë, a Doberman, Blue is interrupted by a middle-aged man who wants to hire her. His widowed older sister, Muffin Crandall, is in jail, having confessed to killing a stranger in her garage five years earlier, then hiding the body in a freezer. The body was discovered by accident when a power failure caused it to defrost.
Blue is intrigued by the case, and could use the money. But she’s not prepared for what follows – archetypes, threats, a small string of murders, and the unexpected resurfacing of Mischa just as she’s feeling her way into a new relationship with Roxie Bouchie, whose secret identity is “The Only Black Woman in North America Who knows All the Words to Every Song Recorded by Garth Brooks.”
Blue is a truly original and captivating heroine, and Padgett’s style continues to deliver. The book is more than a straightforward mystery, although those elements are spot on – the murder is explicable, logical and justifiable, and the motivation is exquisite and satisfying. But Padgett colours the writing with Blue’s experiences – her dissertation was about how primate evolutionary behaviour affects modern man’s default behaviour, and is coloured by her feminist education. So throughout the novel Blue compares the narratives and actions of the people she meets with archetypes, the collective unconscious, and evolutionary and feminist theory. Though this sounds as though it would be tiresomely academic and didactic, in Padgett’s hands the result is a harmonious, humorous, readable and erudite analysis that blends in with the mystery plot seamlessly.
I did think that there was a little too much coincidence for the book to be wholly believable, but that minor flaw only through the rest of this masterpiece into stronger contrast. Irritatingly I discovered that Blue has been waiting on my shelves for me for at last eight years, but perhaps I was meant to read it now, not when I bought it. Now I just have to track down the second in the series, Blue Plate Special, and check what else awaits me. Ah, the more I read the more there is to read! – Alex