In Michelson’s smart mystery debut, a chance encounter sends a professor of Victorian literature reminiscing on a past long left behind. In the late 1970s, Jennifer Morgan flees New York and her languishing dissertation to run a café in the patchouli-scented hamlet of Flanders, a Berkshires town populated “by an opinionated, motley collection of sixties refugees.” While counterculture is waning after the Vietnam war, Flanders remains a silo of the peace-and-love lifestyle—or it seems to be, until a series of violent acts disrupts their idyll, making everyone a suspect and the potential next victim. With the detective assigned to the case having a fierce bias against the hippie lifestyle of Flanders, Jennifer, armed with her expertise on the Victorian novel, decides to piece together the mystery herself in order to protect her beloved community.
As Jennifer chases the truth, Michelson wittily introduces the spectrum of viewpoints and personalities in Flanders. There’s the spiritual transcendental meditators, the local organic farmer, the poet whose “life rested firmly on two treasured principles: the impeccable tastefulness of his drug supply and the poetic superiority of William Butler Yeats,” and Ford McDermott, a local-born police officer who believes in the systems of justice already in place yet still approaches Flanders’s people, pot, collectives, and convictions with an open mind. The milieu invites a satirical approach, and Michelson stirs laughs, but Part of the Solution takes its cast, town, and mystery seriously, proving precise in its evocation of a culture and generous in its exploration of character, peeking into everyone’s flaws and hearts.
Turns out, grad-school research skills have some practical uses, and Jennifer painstakingly picks through the timeline and tangled relationships, just like any good novel detective. Michelson will keep readers guessing as the red herrings accumulate; the conclusion, which feels inevitable only in retrospect, defies expectations and invites contemplation about the nature of justice, and what it means to leave something in the past.
Takeaway: Smart, witty mystery in a hippie Berkshires town as the 1970s fade away.
Comparable Titles: Marcy McCreary’s The Summer of Love and Death, Deborah J. Benoit’s The Gardeners Plot.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
As Jennifer chases the truth, Michelson wittily introduces the spectrum of viewpoints and personalities in Flanders. There’s the spiritual transcendental meditators, the local organic farmer, the poet whose “life rested firmly on two treasured principles: the impeccable tastefulness of his drug supply and the poetic superiority of William Butler Yeats,” and Ford McDermott, a local-born police officer who believes in the systems of justice already in place yet still approaches Flanders’s people, pot, collectives, and convictions with an open mind. The milieu invites a satirical approach, and Michelson stirs laughs, but Part of the Solution takes its cast, town, and mystery seriously, proving precise in its evocation of a culture and generous in its exploration of character, peeking into everyone’s flaws and hearts.
Turns out, grad-school research skills have some practical uses, and Jennifer painstakingly picks through the timeline and tangled relationships, just like any good novel detective. Michelson will keep readers guessing as the red herrings accumulate; the conclusion, which feels inevitable only in retrospect, defies expectations and invites contemplation about the nature of justice, and what it means to leave something in the past.
Takeaway: Smart, witty mystery in a hippie Berkshires town as the 1970s fade away.
Comparable Titles: Marcy McCreary’s The Summer of Love and Death, Deborah J. Benoit’s The Gardeners Plot.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A