Women of substance: cabdriver, muse, and jewel thief
Sister Mine
By Tawni O’Dell
Shaye Areheart, 405 pp., $23
The Wayward Muse
By Elizabeth Hickey
Atria, 304 pp., $24
Friends in High Places
By Marne Davis Kellogg
St. Martin’s, 336 pp., $24.95
Tawni O'Dell's energy bursts off the page. "Sister Mine" is one of those novels that insist on being read, front to back, as fast as possible. Elizabeth Hickey's excellent historical novel "The Wayward Muse" is unhurried, the writing quietly assured. And Marne Davis Kellogg's gilded thriller "Friends in High Places" is perfect plane reading, easy, stylish, entertaining.
O'Dell's first two novels ("Back Roads, "Coal Run") won critical praise and a loyal following . "Sister Mine " has plenty of the tart dialogue and mordant humor her fans love. The setting is another down-at-the-heels Pennsylvania coal-mining town, where violence, poverty, domestic abuse, and corruption are as common as coal dust.
Shae-Lynn Penrose, who narrates the story, left Jolly Mount for Washington, D.C., an unwed mother barely out of her teens, with her 5-year-old son Clay in tow. After 18 years in law enforcement she's back in Jolly Mount, where she drives the only cab in town. At 40-odd, Shae-Lynn dresses like a "middle-aged cowgirl," in Frye boots, a pink Stetson, and a wardrobe of mini-skirts. She's tough, righteous, and randy. O'Dell's first female protagonist is a free spirit, sort of, but her hard shell hides a collection of psychic wounds and physical scars.
Shae-Lynn has always believed that her younger sister, Shannon, was murdered at 16 by their violent father. Shannon disappeared when Shae-Lynn was living in D.C. Now, almost two decades after Shannon vanished, a New York lawyer arrives in Jolly Mount looking for her. Then a wealthy Connecticut woman appears saying that Shannon has stolen her baby. Then Shannon, very pregnant, turns up in Shae-Lynn's kitchen. It seems she's in the womb-for-hire business and her latest baby-making deal has become extremely complicated. The story sprawls all over the place as Shae-Lynn recalls the past and comes to grips with long-held secrets and questionable characters. The plot is, in part, improbable, and so is Shae-Lynn, but O'Dell's affection for her own creations is convincing. At its heart, "Sister Mine" is a tough, tender, sympathetic story of working-class family life in a dying coal-mining town.
Elizabeth Hickey imagines the life of Jane Burden, Dante Gabriel Rossetti' s model and inspiration, in "The Wayward Muse," a deftly written historical novel rich in period detail. Jane, a poor girl born in an Oxford slum , is unusually tall and very thin, with a long, pale, sad face and a mass of coarse, unruly hair. Her family and neighbors consider her ugly and despair of her finding a husband, but her unusual beauty attracts Rossetti's attention. His fellow artist Edward Burne-Jones persuades Jane's grasping mother to allow the 17-year-old to pose, for a fee, as Guenevere in a series of murals . The modeling sessions change Jane's life, introducing her to a group of young artists, writers, and craftsmen who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Jane's face doesn't launch the movement, but she becomes its icon.
Hickey writes persuasively, capturing Jane's confusion as she adjusts to her new life. She and Rossetti fall in love , but he soon drops her to marry his semi-invalid fiancée . Crushed by Rossetti's rejection, Jane agree s to marry his friend and protégé William Morris, an independently wealthy young man, a poet, designer, and social reformer who will found the Arts and Crafts movement. Jane never stops loving Rossetti and takes up with him again after his wife dies. Morris knows about their affair and reluctantly facilitate s it, preferring private humiliation to public scandal. Hickey writes knowledgably about the period , but her research never eclipses her graceful narrative.
Readers who like their escapism ultra-rich, studded with high-end status symbols, may enjoy "Friends in High Places," the fourth in Marne Davis Kellogg's series of thrillers featuring Kick Keswick, surely one of popular literature's most delightful psychopaths. Kick, now a glamorous woman of a certain age ("I'm often mistaken for Miss Deneuve"), has retired from her twin careers as jewel thief/auction house bigwig and is happily living in Provence with her new husband, Scotland Yard inspector emeritus (and retired thief) Thomas Curtis. Kick learns that former employer Ballantine & Co., a prestigious London auction house, has been found to be auctioning fake jewels, poor-quality reproductions, nothing like the meticulously crafted synthetics Kick substituted for the real thing when she was working for (and stealing from) the firm. The scandal threatens to bring down the auction house and, more crucial to Kick, expose her thievery.
Kick masterminds a dangerous plot to replace some of the fake gems she "re-engineered" with the real stones and then re-steal them. At the same time she agrees to help a young nun recover a collection of jewel-encrusted Madonnas stolen from her order years ago . The two story lines come together when Kick disguises herself as a Scottish noblewoman to sneak into a high-society wedding in an Italian castle. The over-the-top plot is the least interesting element of this novel. Kellogg's crisp, slyly humorous writing style is a treat. And she lays on plenty of luscious details as she paints Kick's decadently rich lifestyle. She steals from the rich and gives mostly to herself and never feels a pang of guilt. She might have stepped out of this morning's news. Not an admirable character, but "Friends in High Places" is a flight of fantasy, and a lot of fun.
Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction. 
