07/08/2007

Mystery has many 'Bones' to pick

BY ELIZABETH KANE BUZZELLI

Special to the Record-Eagle

"A Thousand Bones” by P.J. Parrish is a police procedural and then a psychological battle laid in Echo Bay and other Michigan locales from Inkster to the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

Bones are discovered in the woods in the fall of 1975. Carved on trees nearby are Indian symbols for the Hunger Moon, the moon of February, when the murders are carried out.

P.J. Parrish is the pseudonym for sisters Kristy Montee and Kelly Nichols. Raised in Detroit, they now live in the southern United States.

In their latest, Det. Joe Frye, the only female member of the Echo Bay police department, is quickly involved in the case of the bone finds. She is caught between other officers who have not accepted her presence among them, and is shut out of the case. It is only when she is backed by more senior officers from the state police investigative team that she begins to find clues to the murderer and is drawn deeply into the center of what will become a dangerous case involving a serial murderer.

The north woods of Michigan seem to lure more than hunters and fishermen. The mystique of ancient lore and vast stretches of loneliness call out to the mentally disturbed; to those who need isolation to live their cruel fantasies. What better place for sick mind-schemes to play out than bewildering miles of forest, lonely cabins at the end of isolated two-tracks. This is Joe Frye's territory. She is drawn into a very sick web of horrifying murder, all of young girls, some from southern Michigan, one from Boyne, one from Inkster. And on and on.

Some of the girls have been gone for years, but as word of the bone finds spreads, parents collect in Echo Bay, hoping for news — no matter how sad — of a child they loved. The bones of their daughters are found scattered beneath signal trees, in a deep well on property that unsuspecting people purchased and remodeled to live out their retirement there, only to be confronted with horror they never sensed coming.

Michigan fares well at the hands of the writers, who describe its beauty and seasons in vivid tone: "The red purple of the sumacs, the brilliant orange of the sugar maples, the russet brown of the oaks, the gold of the birches.”

There's the view of the dunes that "stretched four hundred feet high, hundreds of miles long, and back in time more than two thousand years. To some, they looked like a woman lying seductively on her side at the water's edge. But most like the image that had given them their name: Sleeping Bear. A mother bear and her two cubs were driven into the lake to escape a forest fire, the Ojibwa legend said, and the cubs grew tired and drowned. The mother bear reached the shore, climbed to the top, and lay down to wait forever for her doomed offspring.” They are lovely, romantic images in a book hardly lovely and hardly romantic.

The story is bloody, the murders graphic. I can't give much more away because the murderer is identified about halfway through the book and the rest becomes a battle of minds and wills, Joe's against the murderer's. She is soon a very real part of the murderer's sickness — trapped, a victim herself.

If I say she eventually wins the struggle, that is only an expectation of all mysteries. But in the winning, Joe Frye loses a great deal, enough to force a lesser woman from the force. Everything is on the line for this struggling officer: life, marriage, even her sense of herself. The story is far reaching on many levels.

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli can be reached at ebuzzelli@aol.com