Mockingbird Court

A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS

A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.

This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.

Mockingbird Court
Juneau Black

You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.

Best Shady Hollow ever.

I have, as always, a lot of opinions, but that is the sum of my thoughts. As with the end of the Secret Shanghai series, parting is such sweet sorrow: sorrow because I have no more new Shady Hollows to read; sweet because I have six beloved Shady Hollows to read and reread until they become fused with my brain in the manner of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I would have gone with this series to the end, into the very fires of BW’s neverending cigar, but I am just slightly relieved that we won’t be getting another twenty books because I already went with Redwall to the end, into twenty-two fires that were all very much alike, and I burned out. (Sorry, Brian. I love you, but damn, dude.) But, as always, I digress. There’s a murder to be solved.

But first, a short presentation on today’s victim and why it’s actually not terrible that he’s dead. Several years before the murder to begin all murders, a young Vera Vixen kicked off her career as a cub reporter in the city in which she was born and raised, under the supervision of editor Richard “Rick” Renard. Despite (or because of) his mutually dissatisfying marriage to publishing heiress Priscilla Burnside, Rick seduced Vera at the first opportunity and groomed her as the latest in a string of young, inexperienced mistresses, and that might have been that if Rick hadn’t also been running a network of bribery and blackmail. He came within a whisker of getting caught when a rival newspaper received word of his activities, but he dodged any sort of accountability by throwing Vera under the bus – or rickshaw, seeing as motorized vehicles are not a thing in this world – and watched her take the fall.

Mortified but unable to prove anything, Vera fled the city and worked odd jobs until she eventually got to the doors of the Shady Hollow Herald. She built her current life bit by bit, but her shame kept her from going back to her parents, from whom she remains estranged. Back in the city, Rick was approached by Vera’s frantic roommate, law student Chloe McKibben, and agreed to “help” her find Vera. The rest is easily guessed. As the years went by and his network of connections and favors expanded, Rick continued to fail his way upwards into ever more prestigious (and lucrative) roles, eventually becoming editor in chief at Fieldstone Books. He can reasonably be assumed to have manipulated his wife into giving him this position, as her family owns the company, but he also ended up with a knife in his back, so joke’s on him.

In the present day, fresh off a trip to the city and with five solved murders under her belt, the adult Vera returns to her beloved Shady Hollow at the turn of the season, arriving just in time for the yearly Harvest Festival. The trip was short – Vera was only there a couple of days to research her current article – but she managed to squeeze in a visit with Chloe, who welcomed her with open arms and an itinerary despite their years-long estrangement. This seems like a great time for a cozy, peaceful fall, especially given the events of the summer, but the Murder Gods instead bless Vera with a completely unexpected visit from best-selling thriller writer Bradley Marvel, last seen making an unspeakable nuisance of himself at the tail end of the Springfield case. Never one for boundaries, Bradley invades Vera’s home in the middle of the night and demands her help: his editor was found stabbed to death in Bradley’s own living room. Vera is horrified to learn that this editor is in fact Rick Renard, whose luck finally ran out. Unfortunately, Bradley (never the brightest candle in the chandelier) immediately made himself the prime suspect when he fled the city, dragging along Darcy Montrose, his overworked assistant. They are followed by Wendell Knox, the metropolitan detective in charge of the case, who immediately fixates on Vera as another likely suspect: an anonymous source informed him of Vera’s relationship with Rick, but the police also found one of her notebooks at the crime scene.

As the case grows more tangled, Vera writes to Chloe to ask her to recommend a criminal attorney and gets more than she ever bargained for when Chloe herself shows up in town with almost her entire wardrobe in tow. (My first thought: “She got there awfully fast.”) Vera is overjoyed when Chloe volunteers to represent her; the perpetually suspicious Lenore is less thrilled, though she later admits that this is partially jealousy. Nevertheless, Chloe settles into town well enough, if one disregards her casual condescension, and starts preparing Vera’s defense. Meanwhile, the good townsfolk rally around Vera and stoutly defend her against Knox, who finds himself unceremoniously uninvited from the Harvest Festival. (Knox proves to be surprisingly mild-mannered, and takes his rejection politely.) During the course of her counter-investigation, Vera learns a number of unsavory factoids – among them the fact that Darcy has plotted and ghostwritten the last several Percy Bannon books to compensate for Bradley’s massive case of writer’s block – but nothing really adds up and everyone seems suspicious until an offhanded remark by Chloe makes everything snap into place.

This is normally the part where Vera would sneak off on her own, but Vera learns from her mistakes, by god, and she actually does arrange meaningful backup before luring Chloe into the woods. Away from the prying eyes and ears of the village, Vera confronts Chloe, who readily admits that she killed Rick and purposely implicated both Vera and Bradley in his murder. Having been groomed in her turn after Vera’s disappearance, Chloe has spent her entire career providing Rick with the kind of sensitive legal intelligence that would get her disbarred in a heartbeat, which made the decision to stab him rather easy. After delivering her villain monologue, Chloe attempts to stab Vera as well, but the knife turns out to be a theater prop and the authorities turn out to be lying in wait. With some timely distraction from Bradley, who gleefully tackles Vera out of harm’s way in his role as the heroic Percy Bannon, Orville and Knox arrest Chloe and cart her off to the Shady Hollow jail, where they take turns standing guard until she can be returned to the city to stand trial. (The police learn from their mistakes, too.)

In the wake of Chloe’s arrest, the village is shocked once again by the abrupt arrival of Priscilla Renard, who announces that she is replacing Rick as editor in chief of Fieldstone Books. With Rick out of the way, she offers Darcy a well-deserved promotion and a book deal, then speaks to Bradley on the future of the Percy Bannon series, warning him that any future Percy Bannon manuscripts will not be secretly written by Darcy. There’s an alarming moment when a giant eagle lands in the middle of the village, but this turns out to be the transport for Maverick Brown, co-owner of Fieldstone, a bit of an odd duck but not a bad fellow. After checking in with Priscilla on the direction of the company, Maverick re-boards his eagle and flies off again for the winter, leaving Fieldstone in Priscilla’s capable paws. When everyone has gone and the dust has settled, Vera writes a detailed letter to her parents for the first time since leaving the city, and invites them to visit her in Shady Hollow.

Stick some wings on me and call me Lenore, because I had Chloe pegged as an antagonist, if not exactly the killer, almost from the moment she arrived. The vibe was so off that it raised my hackles as I watched her swanning around town in her exclusive designer wardrobe, dropping sneers and dripping condescension. I didn’t think of her as the killer because I couldn’t imagine what her motive might be, let alone why she might go out of her way to implicate Vera – and it was clear that she had implicated Vera even before she showed up, because nobody else could possibly have laid paws on Vera’s notebook, and nobody else would’ve had the knowledge to tell the police about Vera’s relationship with Rick – but I knew she was involved in some way. I honestly thought Vera’s sudden decampment was too petty a motive, especially given her history with Rick. I was sort of right, and I was sort of wrong. The full reason is so deeply sad that I do feel for Chloe at least somewhat, in spite of the decisions that proceeded from that sadness. I know what it is like to be abandoned by a friend without a word, not even a simple goodbye, and I can understand Chloe’s resentment. I can understand her anger over Vera’s failure to armor her against Rick, even knowing that Vera had no way of guessing that Chloe would ever encounter Rick. Yet at the same time I am heartbroken for Vera, because I spent half of the book hoping I was wrong. I was suspicious of Chloe just based on the rapidity of her arrival – as my girl Lenore dryly pointed out, she must’ve had her suitcase by the door – but I wanted it to work. I wish I could’ve loved her.

I guess we can go ahead and give this book half a point for mildly surprising me, though Summers End remains the only Shady Hollow book to pull a real “Gotcha!” with the villain reveal. Frankly, I really thought it could be Darcy, though at the same time I knew she was too obvious in the way that Adelaide Chesley was too obvious. What was incredibly clear was that Darcy was secretly writing Bradley’s books, and, whatever her behavior in the beginning, I have to say that I am just pleased as punch with the promotion that she should’ve gotten the moment she became the force behind the Percy Bannon series. At the leadership level, there was no incentive to promote her when she was doing five or six jobs for the price of one and making a shit ton of money for the company and – if I can use my own workplace trauma to extrapolate a little bit here – probably not getting benefits, and I felt that so deeply it was almost personal. BUT THEN in swept Mrs. Priscilla Renard with her pragmatic attitude towards her terrible shit-faced philandering husband and her far more long-sighted plans for the company, her willingness to recognize and reward talent and hard work with more than just a wink and a promise, and I was ready to swear fealty to her and follow her into battle. I especially love her for relieving Darcy of all Bradley-assisting duties because my god that girl deserves a break. Priscilla is the boss every hard worker deserves. Rick was the boss every hard worker deserves to stab. (With a real knife, not that fake one.)

As usual, of course, I love all the regulars, starting with Vera and going all the way down the ranks of the town to Muriel, who puts in an appearance long enough to establish that she is still doing a brisk business with her wonderful popcorns. It seems like every book makes me love Esme von Beaverpelt more, and this book was no exception as she sets every local business against Detective Knox and makes it clear that defiance will come at a cost (i.e., no more coffee from Joe’s, HORROR). Having said that, I also came to like Detective Knox, a level-headed, mild-mannered bison who doesn’t come across amazing in the beginning but gradually shows his character. Of course it doesn’t help that he starts out hyperfixated on Vera as a potential killer, and I was ready to deny him free chili too. All the same, I appreciated his civility even in the face of a village’s worth of indignant citizens. At any rate he made a pleasant change from Deputy Poole, the antagonistic wolverine from Summerhill.

Though this book will be living rent-free in my head in perpetuity, Mirror Lake remains my favorite Shady Hollow book and probably always will. But Mockingbird Court still wins the title of Best Shady Hollow because it has a depth and an emotional heft to it that the other five somewhat lack, possibly because it is so deeply personal to Vera, who previously has been able to observe from a relative distance. This is one case where one bad event piles on top of another, over and over and over again, until it seems like she has nowhere to turn and no way to catch a break. But her community comes together and they back her without question, and even if she and Orville have some difficulties it doesn’t take them long to get back on track. I think that is the part that resonated with me the most: the heart of this community, the heart of these characters, the heart of this story. Vera is never truly alone in this book, the way she has been in others. She wasn’t particularly close to anyone other than Lenore in the beginning, but any barriers in the original Shady Hollow are gone, and the community has fully embraced her as one of its own.

I cannot recommend this series enough. I need to start counting the number of people I’ve bamboozled into picking it up, because as of this writing it’s at least two or three. It isn’t all heartbreak and murder; it’s cozy and inspiring and packed with amazing foods (see also: cozy) and so slyly funny. Lefty’s festival soup bath had me howling; likewise the key phrase that brought Bradley sprinting to rescue Vera from a murderer armed with a collapsible prop knife. This was exactly the book and the series that I needed, at exactly the time that I needed them, and I bless the ultra-specific circumstances that ultimately brought Shady Hollow into existence. I might have had some slight technical issues in the beginning, but what an amazing ride. This world is just perfect, and I wouldn’t change a thing.