Emma Graham, amateur sleuth and cub reporter for the weekly Conservative newspaper, has has survived an attempt on her life and solved one crime in Spirit Lake.

Now she’s on the trail of a hauntingly unsolved twenty year old crime: the kidnapping of baby Fay Slade from the Belle Ruin hotel that is eerily similar to the Lindbergh kidnapping.

But was the baby really kidnapped or murdered and buried by her parents in an attempt to shake down the baby’s grandfather?

Review

12-year-old Hotel Paradise waitress and junior reporter Emma Graham is supposed to be writing the third and final installment of her story regarding the recent attempt on her life by

Isabel Devereau. Unfortunately, however, every time she sits down to put pen to paper, all she can think about is the decades-old disappearance of the Slade baby from a room at the Belle Ruin Hotel. So when the missing baby’s father, Morris Slade, returns to town for the first time in over 20 years, Emma can’t help but see it as a sign that she should do some investigating. Why has Morris come back to Cold Flat Junction? What’s the deal with the Hotel Paradise’s strange new bellhop? Who is the mysterious girl Emma keeps seeing around town – and why does she look so much like the family of the missing child? Everyone’s got something to hide, but nothing will stay hidden for long with Emma on the case…

Fadeaway Girl is the fourth of Martha Grime’s Emma Graham Mysteries and is a direct sequel to the previous three installments of young Emma’s tale. By that, I mean that when you start the book, you’re dumped straight in the middle of a rather complicated story that’s already had a thousand or so pages to unfold – a treat, I’m sure, for those who’ve been following along from the start and have been waiting to find out what happens next, but incredibly daunting (and not just a little confusing) to the uninitiated among us.

That’s not to say that Emma doesn’t make for charming company while you’re casting about, trying to make heads or tails of the plot. The girl may be twelve, but to say she’s a very mature twelve would be an understatement. Emma’s an old soul. Jaded, even. And to call her precocious somehow feels insulting, so let’s just say the girl’s got moxie. She’s Nora Charles meets Encyclopedia Brown meets Anastasia Krupnik, with a little Ramona Quimby thrown in for good measure, and while you may not understand the reason for her obsession with a crime that took place long before she was even born, you can’t help but admire her tenacity and resourcefulness in trying to solve it.

The characters that inhabit Emma’s world are quirky, timeless, and occasionally off-putting – not unlike the folks David Lynch dreamed up to populate Twin Peaks – but they’re quite well-drawn and help to keep the reader engaged in Grimes’ story. And the book’s atmosphere isn’t exactly mainstream or traditional, either. While it’s not even remotely a horror novel, Fadeaway Girl still somehow has an air of Southern gothic to it – a slow, deliberate creepiness born of history, heat, money, and scandal that puts me in mind of Michael McDowell’s writing. Throw in the fact that Fadeaway Girl isn’t so much a mystery as it is a story about the way tragedy can shape a town and its people, and you end up with a book that’s rather difficult to categorize (and even more difficult to review). I guess the upshot is this: if you’ve read Grimes’ other Emma Graham Mysteries, by all means pick this up; the secrets Emma manages to uncover over the course of Fadeaway Girl are fascinating on their own, but are doubtless even more satisfying when taken as part of a larger, more epic story. But if this would be your first exposure to Emma and Cold Flat Junction, I suggest you look to Grimes’ back catalog, instead.

Reviewed by Kat

READERS COMMENTS