Jean HagerCritiques

I recently had the chance to buy some like-new paperbacks of vintage 80's / 90's cozy mysteries, and this was one of them. I'd read this series back in '94 when it first came out and although I remember not loving it, it stuck with me, and I wanted to see how it held up 20-odd years later.

Here's the weird thing - I remembered exactly who had done it, and why, including the plot twist, as soon as I started to read the book. I rarely remember character names 5 minutes after I put a book down but all these characters came flooding back immediately, along with the plot in its entirety.

So, I don't know if this book suffered from age or my unusually clear memory of it, so I'll just say this: I remember thinking it was mediocre when I read it the first time, and I thought it was mediocre this time.

I have one more of this series that was part of my vintage haul; perhaps it'll be better, or my memory worse, and I'll enjoy the nostalgia trip more.

Lots of arguing for a Christian church plus a spineless minister. Hard to feel sorry for the death of such a womanizer personality as Sherwood Draper was. Did feel for his wife. Introduced quite a few characters in the beginning which made it confusing trying to figure out which would be important. There were several families that were less than ideal and so it was sad that what appeared to be a good family is the one so destroyed by the ending. Luke proposed to her.

Nice cozy mystery.

This is the first in the Molly Bearpaw series by Oklahoma author Jean Hager (who actually lives up the street from me!) I actually read most of the series and the Mitch Bushyhead series thirty or so years ago. Obviously, I have forgotten the details in that time. I remember these books as wonderful, cozy mysteries. I was right!

In Ravenmocker, Molly, who works for the Cherokee nation, investigates mysterious nursing home deaths. There's a touch of romance with the mystery, and the reader learns some interesting facts about the Cherokee and their culture. The mystery has a satisfying resolution that I didn't figure out half way through the novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it.½

A fun little Molly Bearpaw mystery involving the Cherokee National Museum, blow darts, wampum and the dynamics of the community.

Quick read.½

Boring. This is a book I'll dump on some unsuspecting library book sale soon. The female sleuth recovering from a bad relationship and renting from an active elderly man sounds a lot like Grafton's Kinsey Millhone. Molly Bearpaw suffers by comparison.
Rather than show us Molly's intelligent thought processes, we are treated to paragraph after paragraph of Molly pacing the floor or reading her notes once again, trying to think of what she's missing. At one point she wonders "if Perrone was much more than a friend..."(p. 195) and 2 pages later without having done any research to check this she is declaring "Obviously your brother...". Molly asks suspects about their relatives life insurance policies, then thinks that their angry reaction is a sure sign of guilt.
Hager has a skewed idea of what nurses learn, assuming that they would know about companies who culture botulism bacilli (p. 165). Nurses don't have spare time for running their own science experiments, and even if they studied bacteria in school, all supplies were purchased by the school not themselves.
Molly collects a water sample in a rinsed jelly jar. Where I come from, the lab provides sealed containers so no contaminants get in the sample from a source other than the water supply.½

This wasn't, to me, a very interesting book and was a disappointment as I had been looking forward to reading it. A bit formulaic, neither the characters or the mystery grabbed my interest. I may read the next book in the series to see if things improve.½

murder of Cherokee painter, is it connected to medicine society?