Concerning The Ebony Swan

(Written by Phyllis Whitney.) Alex is worried. Her granddaughter Susan is coming for a visit, and she's not entirely sure that's a good thing. After all, the girl's father wasn't exactly fond of his mother-in-law, particularly after Susan's mother died in a terrible accident. Grandmother and granddaughter might not get along. At the same time, Alex can't help but think that Susan might just be able to shed some light on the terrible tragedy of so many years ago. Too young at the time to understand, Susan had nevertheless been a witness to her mother's accident. But Alex isn't at all sure that she wants more light on her daughter's death; light has a tricky way of exposing things that some people prefer to leave in the dark.

It is typically easy to guess the murderers in Whitney's books. Luckily, that isn't the case in The Ebony Swan. I thought I had the murderer picked out just a few pages into the book, but I was wrong. After that, every hypothesis I invented was proved wrong. In fact, the revelation near the end was rather surprising. That's the most important thing in any mystery book, and one of only two things that kept this one afloat.

The other was the likeability of the heroine and hero. Susan is a very nice woman, and Peter seems a good man. I'm not real fond of the idea that he and his wife were separated, but at least she's dead. (Cold-blooded, I know, but there it is...)

Unfortunately, there are bad sides to The Ebony Swan as well. First, the lack of certain details was, frankly, annoying. For example, Alex thinks her husband's last words are puzzling. Whitney won't say what they were until near the end of the book - but the words were not important. If they had contained some revelation that perhaps the reader could have used to find the murderer, I would understand the omission. But they were very obvious. And there are few things more annoying in books than having suspense built up around a certain element only to be disappointed in its capacity to surprise.

Then there was the annoyance of the affair. In a curious sort of way, it's condoned and condemned at the same time. Alex, who was years younger than her husband, had a short affair with another man who tried to convince her to leave her husband. She stayed, and the lover ended up marrying somebody else. Showing that she does have some idea that adultery is wrong, Alex is very relieved that her husband knew nothing of her affair. But she is also only half regretful of what she did. She doesn't acknowledge that it was really wrong, and she even seems to regret not leaving her husband once or twice throughout the book. Most disconcerting.

Ultimately, The Ebony Swan is a fairly decent, fairly clean mystery novel with a likeable heroine. Some pointless sleight of pen and murky morals could have held up to a good scrubbing, but it's still fairly enjoyable.

My Rating: T (thematic elements)