Reply To: TBC: Discuss the murder mystery.
I was most definitely surprised. I figured all along that Grace was the first victim; as Nancy said, she was the resident in 4B. And I was poised to be very sad because Grace was such an amazing woman, smart, witty, generous, empathetic and capable of eliciting peoples’ stories. I was equally in the dark about the second victim.
And, I found a certain justice in the death’s of the two actual victims, men who were cruel and violent.
That Grace could kill in self-defense did not surprise me. Arlene was a surprise. In the context of her belief that Sutherland was, like Grace, a communist, and therefore needed to be eliminated and believing the police would not get there in time, I could picture her impulsive attack. Still, clubbing him in the head with Bea’s baseball bat was incongruent with the Arlene I pictured.
I really enjoyed the way the story was told, weaving the plot into the characterizations and personal stories of the women and the other characters. At times, I almost forgot it was a murder mystery, except for the “Interstitial” sections that reminded me there was more to come. And I really enjoyed the way the narrator in the “Interstitial” was the house itself.
