Cleis Press
June 2003
Johnson's third novel in The Woman Who series, The Woman Who Found Grace, strikes me as a book straddling the line between genre mystery and literary whodunit. That's a tough line to straddle, no doubt about it. Johnson succeeds at combining these two essentially irreconcilable forms as well as any author I've read to date. Could be that's why we don't hear more about this author: she's not quite genre, not quite literary.
Even the structure and the two narrative viewpoints themselves are schizophrenic. There's the tall, gorgeous, Angelique-Jolie-type "hit man," Cordelia Morgan, who slips like a chilling night wind through every novel. Then there's a central narrator which changes with each book. In the case of this third novel, it's Grace Frost, AKA "Killer Frost," who's lately been released from a long prison term after being convicted of killing and dismembering her two best friends and stuffing them in a steamer trunk bound for Los Angeles. Grace is platinum, gorgeous, and apparently ageless. She's just the right stuff for a genre mystery: we're looking for who killed Grace's next door neighbor found in a trunk on Grace's porch. Looks like Killer Frost is up to her old tricks. Not so, of course.
June 2003
Johnson's third novel in The Woman Who series, The Woman Who Found Grace, strikes me as a book straddling the line between genre mystery and literary whodunit. That's a tough line to straddle, no doubt about it. Johnson succeeds at combining these two essentially irreconcilable forms as well as any author I've read to date. Could be that's why we don't hear more about this author: she's not quite genre, not quite literary.
Even the structure and the two narrative viewpoints themselves are schizophrenic. There's the tall, gorgeous, Angelique-Jolie-type "hit man," Cordelia Morgan, who slips like a chilling night wind through every novel. Then there's a central narrator which changes with each book. In the case of this third novel, it's Grace Frost, AKA "Killer Frost," who's lately been released from a long prison term after being convicted of killing and dismembering her two best friends and stuffing them in a steamer trunk bound for Los Angeles. Grace is platinum, gorgeous, and apparently ageless. She's just the right stuff for a genre mystery: we're looking for who killed Grace's next door neighbor found in a trunk on Grace's porch. Looks like Killer Frost is up to her old tricks. Not so, of course.
The genre runs through the predictable gamut of red herrings and villains and good guys who win out in the end.
I don't mind a genre mystery if it's riveting, as this one is. And if it's well written. On this front, Johnson could hold her own on the literary front if she'd settle down into a more respectable niche. She's that good. In fact, what sets this novel apart from any you've probably read lately is its refusal to play nice. Johnson creates a shivery mixture of Attitude and Amorality when she lets Cord Morgan on stage. The writing shifts in tone. Becomes darkly poetic. Intriguing. Is Morgan a cold-blooded nutcase? Or the new millennium avenger, complete with a black horse which she pulls around the country behind her? We never quite know, but she's certainly a character that grabs our emotions and twists just to see what kind of juice we've got running in our veins. If she's amoral, we don't seem to mind. If she's waiting to put a bullet through someone's forehead, we're shamelessly watching to see how she pulls it off.
It's an interesting concept-using the novel as a structural and thematic forcing ground to test the genetic viability of cloning opposites.
I don't mind a genre mystery if it's riveting, as this one is. And if it's well written. On this front, Johnson could hold her own on the literary front if she'd settle down into a more respectable niche. She's that good. In fact, what sets this novel apart from any you've probably read lately is its refusal to play nice. Johnson creates a shivery mixture of Attitude and Amorality when she lets Cord Morgan on stage. The writing shifts in tone. Becomes darkly poetic. Intriguing. Is Morgan a cold-blooded nutcase? Or the new millennium avenger, complete with a black horse which she pulls around the country behind her? We never quite know, but she's certainly a character that grabs our emotions and twists just to see what kind of juice we've got running in our veins. If she's amoral, we don't seem to mind. If she's waiting to put a bullet through someone's forehead, we're shamelessly watching to see how she pulls it off.
It's an interesting concept-using the novel as a structural and thematic forcing ground to test the genetic viability of cloning opposites.
Ultimately, I'm not sure that it works, that oil and water are ever going to shake hands and merge. I'm not even sure we want them to. Maybe that's what I like about this odd series: Johnson seems less interested in shaping the genre mystery than in relishing its undoing.
