Mission Hill, by Pamela Wechsler
New York:
Minotaur Books, 2016
List of
main characters:
Abby
Endicott, narrator and assistant district attorney for Suffolk County in
Massachusetts
Ty
Clarke, Endicott’s boyfriend
Kevin
Farnsworth, Boston police detective
Max
Lombardo, district attorney and Endicott’s boss
Owen
Guilfoyle, Max Lombardo’s chief of staff
Carl
Ostroff, channel 7 reporter
Orlando
Jones, gang member (North Street Posse)
Melvin
Jones, Orlando’s father
Dermot
Michaels, assistant district attorney for Middlesex County
Joshua
(Josh) McNamara, FBI agent
I wanted Mission Hill to give me a story that
would keep me coming back. I heard the author interviewed on National Public
Radio, and her description of the novel’s opening hooked me right away. Her
background writing two of my favorite Law
& Order shows sealed it for me. The novel almost met my expectations, and
I would recommend it.
An
unnamed narrator (Abby Endicott gives her name in the second chapter) opens the
novel by describing her nightly ritual of listing all the people that she has
prosecuted for murder:
My list contains twenty-six names. It’s arranged in
chronological order and reaches back four years. It used to include victims,
the people who fuel my addiction to the job and keep me coming back for more.
When my homicides climbed into double digits, there were too many names to
remember. Someone had to go, either predator or prey. Reluctantly, I let go of
my victims, held on to my killers. I had to. That’s the whole point. They
remember me, so I have to remember them. (page 1)
The novel
starts right away in noir mode: full of angst, dread, and anxiety. And the
unnamed narrator/prosecutor has a legitimate basis for her fears: She’s an
assistant district attorney for Suffolk County in Massachusetts, a jurisdiction
that includes the city of Boston. She’s prosecuted several criminals who could
easily blame her for their incarceration and single her out for revenge. But
the next several chapters are mired in laying out the details of the first murder
that occurs in the time frame of the novel and introducing numerous characters.
You might
think, because of the list of characters that opens this blog, that I must be
easily overwhelmed if I couldn’t keep track of ten characters. But that list is
the short version. As I got deeper into the story, I decided to write down
characters’ names and a brief description of each so I could keep track of
everyone—and maybe even guess the identity of the murderer before I finished
the novel. After several chapters, I gave up adding to the list, but before I
gave up, I had forty-two characters. Many of them were related to one another,
which made it more difficult to keep track of them. The experience reminded me
of Russian novels that list the characters and their relationships at the front
of the book so English readers would know who was who, except that I had to
write this list myself.
I also
found the organization of the novel to be a bit choppy. With less than 300
pages divided into fifty-three chapters, the narrative was broken, it seemed to
me, almost arbitrarily. The reader is rarely invited into the mind and the
heart of Abby Endicott, the narrator and main character. I wanted to know more
about her feelings and her reasoning when it came to all the events in the
story, not just the case that she was charged with prosecuting after the start
of the novel. (I sided with her boyfriend Ty Clarke when they argued about how
little they divulged to one another.) I wanted to care about her and her
circumstances. It wasn’t until Chapter 43 that I began to be truly absorbed by
the story. Until that point, I had lots of places, occupations, and plot
twists, in addition to people, to track and sort, with little reflection from
Endicott on what it all meant to her. I wish the novel had delved into both the
characters and the events more slowly or had handled all the details more
subtly so that I didn’t notice the number of characters and didn’t feel overwhelmed
by all the information.
So why
would I recommend Mission Hill after
registering these observations?
First, I
have a feeling that this novel will be made into a great neo-noir film in the
near future. I can already picture Ben Affleck directing it. If you enjoy
seeing how a story is transformed from a book into a film, as I do, then
reading the book first is obligatory. It’s a good story in print; it’s possible
I allowed my expectations to be raised too high, after all.
Second, in
spite of my careful notes and reading, I never had a clue about the identity of
the murderer. (Notice that I give no spoilers in this blog post.) The element
of surprise, especially in noir literature or film noir, is a huge plus. Mission Hill delivers the element of
surprise.
And
third, I suspect that Wechsler has more Abby Endicott stories to pen. And I
hope that’s true because I would like to see what happens next for her and her
boyfriend Ty Clarke.
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