The Book Whisperer Reviews Carolyn Hart

The Book Whisperer's Review of Letter from Home by Carolyn Hart

Carolyn Hart, Oklahoma author, has published fifty-eight books and still going. She has created several mystery series: Henrie O, Death on Demand, and Bailey Ruth Raeburn. In addition to the series novels, she has written a number of stand-alone novels. Letter from Home falls into that stand-alone category.

Letter from Home won the Agatha Award for Best Mystery of 2003. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers. Hart has received numerous other awards for her other fiction. In 2003, at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, DC, Hart was included as one of ten mystery authors for Letter from Home. She received the same honor again in 2007 for Set Sail for Murder, seventh in the Henrie O series.

A native Oklahoman, Hart graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma. Hart continues to live in OKC.

As a guest blogger on Dear Reader, http://dearreader.typepad.com/dear/2012/09/dear-reader-column-09-27-12.html, Carolyn Hart writes about being a child during WWII. She tells readers, “The war dominated our lives.” As a teenager and adult, Hart has continued her interest in WWII, reading about it and writing about it. In fact, Hart has written novels centered around WWII: Escape from Paris, Brave Hearts, and Letter from Home.

Hart also developed a love of newspapers and became a reporter herself, if briefly. Her love of reporters and newspapers has helped her create several journalists in her stories. Letter from Home combines both of Hart’s interests in WWII and newspapers.

Set in hot, dry small-town Oklahoma in the summer of 1944, Letter from Home tells the story of Gretchen Grace Gilman, 13 (almost 14), who becomes Gazette reporter GG Gilman. Gilman goes on to become a famous newspaper reporter. A letter from a long-ago friend has brought GG, now a successful journalist, wife, mother, and grandmother back to her small Oklahoma hometown. Thus, readers see the story through Gretchen’s eyes from 1944.

Who has written the letter which summons Gretchen from her happy, successful life in CA back to OK? Readers see bits and pieces of the letter as Gretchen visits the cemetery where so many from her early life lie buried: her cherished grandmother, her father, Mr. Dennis from the Gazette, Faye Tatum, and Clyde Tatum. As she looks at the graves, she remembers that last summer she spent in her hometown, looking back on the terrible events that culminated in two deaths, a lack of justice then, and also her beloved grandmother’s death from a heart attack.

The hot Oklahoma summer adds to the mystery surrounding Faye Tatum’s death and her husband’s disappearance. Because Faye has been visiting the Blue Light night club in town while her husband Clyde is away serving his country, gossips believe she has been cheating on Clyde. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that Clyde in a fit of jealousy has killed Faye and then fled. Small town gossip feeds that theory. Faye and Clyde’s daughter Barb insists her mother has been faithful to her father. Her mother has gone to the Blue Light only because she likes to dance.

As he writes his story, Cooley, writer for the Gazette tells Mr. Dennis, Gazette editor, and GG that “Faye Tatum … danced every dance. But with everybody. You know what I mean, no particular guy…. She danced with a bunch of guys.” Even though Faye does not single out one guy with whom to dance, the gossip continues. Besides being a wife and mother, Faye is an artist. That’s enough to add to the suspicion surrounding her because she is not like the other mothers in town.

As people press the police to find the murderer, presumably Clyde Tatum, the Oklahoma heat presses down on the town. Hart describes the heat well throughout the book. As Gretchen and her grandmother walk to the Tatum home on their way to Faye’s funeral, readers feel the heat: “Blazing heat pressed against them. Every patch of shadow from the thick-leafed oaks was a welcome respite, a fractional lessening of the heat’s burden.” In the church, the description continues with “the heat was suffocating, thick and heavy as the dusty purple velvet curtains at each end of the opening into the chapel.”

Gretchen’s grandmother’s last name is Pfizer; she still speaks with a heavy German accent. Often, she forgets and lapses into German phrases in speaking to others. Occasionally, in grandmother’s café, some stranger remarks about the German even though grandmother has changed the name from Pfizer Café to Victory Café and keeps pictures of local men serving in the army at the register.

Gretchen is a precocious, responsible young lady, wise above her thirteen years. She helps grandmother in the Victory Café and writes grownup articles for the Gazette. She is even well on her way to solving the murder when she suddenly must leave her hometown following her grandmother’s heart attack and subsequent death.

Hart has captured the heat of that 1944 summer in small-town Oklahoma. Letter from Home forms a good mystery with an unexpected twist at the end. Does Clyde kill the love of his life out of jealousy? Could someone else be the murderer? Will justice be served?

Carolyn Hart has an extensive Web site where readers can learn about all of her books and more: http://www.carolynhart.com/.