Gypsy Sins

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is a readable murder mystery with an eventful plot, good suspense,
a credible solution, and a depressing theme. The detective, retired
Boston policeman Joe McGuire, along with most of the other characters,
must deal with unhappiness, both deserved and undeserved, and with
several kinds of personal guilt. One character, talking about the
suicides of her adopted son and her husband, comments, “It was very
clear that I would be either destroyed by those events or made stronger.
And I refused to be destroyed. So I became strong. I deserve no credit
for that. I simply had no choice in the matter.”

The story begins with the death of McGuire’s aunt, which brings him
to Cape Cod from his Caribbean retirement; her doctor suspects murder.
The investigation confronts McGuire with his feelings about his aunt and
his dead cousin, Terry, and with the personal problems of Terry’s
onetime high-school friends. The unraveling of the mystery goes back to
the death of a promiscuous widow more than 20 years before. The
development of the plot and the characters’ psychology is reminiscent
of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer stories, though McGuire is more scarred
and driven than Archer.

The writing is sometimes a bit mannered. For instance, the characters
uniformly say “The hell” for “What the hell.” This may be
characteristic of a Cape Cod dialect, but it looks odd. On the whole,
though, the tale is fluently told and the conclusion is satisfying.