Death in the Details, by Katie Tietjen

As an amateur miniaturist, I couldn’t resist the cover; as someone who’s been fascinated by Frances Glessner Lee for years, there was no way I wouldn’t ask for this ARC, and was ecstatic to get it. (see footnote ¹)

Beware: death of a sibling; death of a spouse; sexism; disability; racism; domestic violence; suicide; PTSD; copaganda

Death in the Details, by Katie Tietjen

The novel, apparently a debut and first in series, is narrated in third person, past tense, entirely from the point of view of one Maple Bishop. The first woman to graduate from law school in Boston, she and her husband Bill moved to the small town of Elderberry in Vermont; where he would take over as town doctor from the man through whom the two had met years before, and she would…be the town doctor’s wife.

This life is not the freedom Maple had worked so hard to earn, but it is the 1940s, and needs must: her mother is dead, her brother is dead, no one will hire a woman lawyer, and this is a way to leave the Boston slums where she grew up, and where she lost everyone she’d loved, behind.

Three years later, a recently widowed Maple is facing not just poverty again, but homelessness. Her law degree is useless in a town with one law firm and many misogynists, and after the payoff from Bill’s life insurance is swallowed by his debts, she finds hope in the one thing she’s devoted her focus and passion since moving to Vermont: she can sell some of the many dollhouses she has completed, and perhaps get enough custom orders to support herself. (see footnote ²)

Again not the stuff dreams are made off, but Maple needs to earn money in a hurry, she doesn’t have any other means of earning money, and people seem interested, so it’s a case of “little to lose. plenty to gain”.

That is, until she finds a body, and things spiral out of control with a quickness.

The book blurb sets the novel up thus:

Inspired by the real-life mother of forensic science, Frances Glessner Lee, and featuring a whip-smart, intrepid sleuth in post-WWII Vermont, this debut historical mystery will appeal to fans of Victoria Thompson and Rhys Bowen.

Maple Bishop is ready to put WWII and the grief of losing her husband, Bill, behind her. But when she discovers that Bill left her penniless, Maple realizes she could lose her Vermont home next and sets out to make money the only way she knows how: by selling her intricately crafted dollhouses. Business is off to a good start—until Maple discovers her first customer dead, his body hanging precariously in his own barn.

Something about the supposed suicide rubs Maple the wrong way, but local authorities brush off her concerns. Determined to help them see “what’s big in what’s small,” Maple turns to what she knows best, painstakingly recreating the gruesome scene in miniature: death in a nutshell.

With the help of a rookie officer named Kenny, Maple uses her macabre miniature to dig into the dark undercurrents of her sleepy town, where everyone seems to have a secret—and a grudge. But when her nosy neighbor goes missing and she herself becomes a suspect, it’ll be up to Maple to find the devil in the details—and put him behind bars.

Drawing inspiration from true crime and offering readers a smartly plotted puzzle of a mystery, Death in the Details is a stunning series debut.

The opening scene, where Maple learns of her precarious financial circumstances, is heartbreaking; the gleeful callousness of the same lawyers who had refused to hire her years before may be read as slightly cartoonish if one didn’t see it all around us in real life. (see footnote ³)

But this scene also starts developing Maple’s character as someone who is not just an outsider–the urban woman with professional aspirations who didn’t fit in the small town social circles she was expected to navigate–; not also someone who finds herself utterly alone in the world, having lost every person she has loved who loved her back; but also different from what women were expected to be and behave.

Whether the author meant to or not, several of Maple’s personality traits resemble ADHD and/or autism. She has a photographic memory, which has set her apart her entire life, at the same time that it helped with her studies and her escape from poverty; she also tends to hyperfocus to the exclusion of things like food or sleep. She feels things deeply and struggles to regulate her emotions; she often says exactly what she thinks or sees–leading her one friend to tell Maple that she’s “too honest”—which doesn’t make her the easiest person to like; and she has difficulty parsing and reacting appropriately to other people’s emotions.

“People were exhausting. It occurred to Maple that she had engaged in more interpersonal relations in the past week than she typically did in a month, and she longed for the solitude of her house, where her only company was the stray cat who required only food and the occasional pat.” (Chapter 19)

When the police are quick to declare the death either suicide or accident, Maple’s legal training and her photographic memory of the scene lead her to discard either as the truth, and she recreates the death scene as a miniature, in the hope that it will help her work out what actually happened.

Maple’s experiences with cops have never been what one would call the Mayberry’s Andy Griffith ideal. Instead, those encounters reflect the reality of what most people who actually come in contact with cops in “professional” settings experience: callousness towards victims and a generalized sense of aggressive disdain for “civilians”, especially those who are poor and/or marginalized by society–never mind the whole “protect and serve” bullshit.

So while it enrages her sense of justice, it is not a surprise when the sheriff essentially threatens her with jail if she makes waves over Elijah Wallace’s death: the man was hated by most of the town, he was a wife beater and a cattle killer, and they are all better off with him dead. On top of which, the death certificate signed by the medical examiner says it was an accidental death: case closed.

Things should end there; however, for reasons of his own, Deputy Ken Quirk pushes Maple to find out what actually happened. He is convinced that they can eventually convinced the sheriff to reopen the case.

“His eyes shone with the fervor of the optimistic and the unjaded. Had she ever looked like that? Had she ever felt that level of righteous conviction that justice would prevail? That people were inherently good?” (Chapter 9)

The events of the novel happen inside a week, and while there is an underlying feeling of tension and urgency the entire time, at the same time that the narrative seems to never hurry, somehow reflecting the slow pace of life one expects in a rural time in the middle of the 20th Century. Also, having donated her late husband’s car tires to the war effort years before, Maple walks everywhere; going back and forth between locations, to deliver her dollhouses, to have conversations with people, and so forth. In fact, she only uses a telephone twice in the book.

The small rural town setting is very convincing; there’s enough physicality to it–how long it takes Maple to walk from her to there, how the density of houses and the presence of businesses as opposed to fields and barns, etc. changes depending on where she goes, and so on–to make it tangible, and there’s enough regarding the social mores and class distinctions, including racism, to make it real.

Part of the sense of danger stems from seeing everything exclusively from Maple’s point of view, and she is acutely aware of how much of an outsider she is. She understands many of the most obvious rules of small towns, such as how her refusal to play the gossip game with wives’ leader Ginger Comstock made her an outcast of Elderberry’s ‘society’, but she’s acutely aware of how much she doesn’t know about the town, including long standing feuds, friendships, and other personal relationships, and how these intersect with the murder.

Then there’s the fact that she still needs to earn enough to support herself; she’s behind on the mortgage and facing eviction, and her new business venture depends entirely on the town’s good opinion of her–which she has already mostly lost.

One of the best parts about this book is that while Maple is quite certain of herself when it comes to facts, she’s constantly interrogating herself when it comes to her interpretation of those, allowing newly found information and evidence to change her mind, so that her theories fit the facts, rather than trying to force the facts to fit a preconceived conclusion.

“Uncoovering the truth didn’t always result in satisfaction or vindication. Often, it seemed to make the seeker more miserable, more jaded, than he’d been when he’d set out. And yet.” (Chapter 31)

This flexibility of mind extends to other aspects of Maple’s personality, in the form of a certain insecurity in how she relates to people–she does find them exhausting, because their behavior is always open to various interpretations, and finding which one is the truth (I.e., the intention behind expressions, words, and actions), is never straightforward for her.

When given an opportunity to given an interview for a “feel good/human interest” story, Maple isn’t sure whether she should take it and run, or not, and her internal struggle makes her not just relatable, but human.

“Angela Wallace had been impressed with Maple’s initiative, and so it seemed was the young reporter. But by leaning into her dollhouse making, was Maple truly making a name for herself as an independent business woman? or what she settling for what society expected and allowed for her?” (Chapter 21)

Most of the other characters are less well rendered, not because of a lack in the writing, but because they are all seen exclusively through Maple’s eye, and we’ve already established that she struggles with persona interactions. However, it’s worth mentioning how as she spends more time with both Kenny and Ben, the widowed, half-Japanese owner of the hardware store where Mabel displays and sells her dollhouses, she sees them more clearly over time, and so does the readers.

Aside: Ben is the only non-white character in the entire book; as the setting is Vermont (the second whitest U.S. state), this makes sense. It also makes sense that there’s quite a bit of passive-aggressive racism directed his way, not the least because of Japan’s role in WWII.

The other side of this is the inevitable creeping copaganda, as eventually Maple’s fact finding persuades even the callous sheriff to the truth.

I would not call this a fair play mystery; while most of the facts needed to solve the mystery are presented to the reader as Maple finds them out, there is a final key piece of information that reeks of Deus Ex Machina. Still, the climactic scene is quite thrilling, and the denouement after it is really very satisfying.

Maple grows a lot in the space of that eventful week, and learns to let go of some of the survival reflexes of her childhood and youth, as well as some of her grief, opening herself to more people in a way that feels organic and sustainable. There is even a hint of a potential romantic relationship with Ben, and Maple’s own social position in town is now secure, based entirely on merit and not on her marriage.

I really enjoyed Death in the Details, and hope that we see further novels about Maple and Elderberry. 8.50 out of 10.

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¹ Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) was an heiress with an interest in medicine, policing and the nascent science of forensics, at a time when women, especially women of a certain class, were not allowed to do anything but marry and be obedient and fruitful wives. Her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death provided novel and efficient training for police departments, and her, a way to fulfill her dreams of a career as a criminologist. Here’s an article in the New Yorker about her and the Nutshell Studies; here’s a Vox video (on YouTube) on the Nutshell Studies, and here’s Wikipedia on her life.

²1:12 or one-to-twelfth is the traditional scale (or ratio) of dollhouses, both for children’s play and for display, which was their historical purpose; essentially, whatever measures one foot in real life, measures one inch in scale. This allows for astounding fidelity in the reproduction of every day items, as it’s large enough for scaled down printed material to be readable, for example, and things like functional door hinges, windows, clothing, lights, etc can be made to accurate scale; while, at the same time, these houses are still small enough to be portable.

³ There’s a reason for the #LetThemEatCereal Kellogg’s boycott to be underway: wealthy people do rejoice in their power to crush the powerless and the poor.