Closed in Silence

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Although the mystery genre has stretched its boundaries during the last 20 years, certain requirements pertaining to plot and motivation, e.g., who committed the crime and why, still obtain. Drury, in this disappointing third Tyler Jones tale (following Silent Words, 1996), skirts those demands as she focuses almost exclusively on portraying the relationships among her characters. Tyler, a San Francisco journalist, attends a 20th reunion with five college friends on an isolated island in Puget Sound. Tyler, Mary Sharon, Rachel and Teddie are lesbians; Grace has remained asexual; Julie has married. Their fond memories of participation in a burgeoning feminist movement, and their subsequent successes and struggles reveal six smart, accomplished women, articulate in feminist and lesbian polemics. Then a storm cuts telephone service with the mainland. Tyler and Mary Sharon discover a dead man they don't recognize; the others confess they each had a connection to him. With all mutually suspicious of one another, the tension mounts, forcing secrets into the open that eventually draw the six women closer. In an anticlimax, they're rescued by the Coast Guard and plan their next get-together and readers are left, unforgivably, to guess at the murderer's identity and motive.

Library Journal

Traditional mystery situations and fascinating characters make this an easy title to recommend--despite the realistic but somewhat disappointing denouement. Six feminist friends celebrate their 20th college reunion by gathering on an isolated, privately owned Puget Sound Island. During a frightening but spectacular storm their first night there, someone murders a man on the rocky shore. Journalist/lesbian sleuth Tyler Jones discovers the body, then begins investigating motive and opportunity. A fine addition to the series (Silent Words, LJ 10/1/96).

Kirkus Reviews

Twenty years after their college graduation, six women meet on a tiny island in Puget Sound for an informal reunion. At the invitation of AIDS researcher Rachel Fineberg, all of them, Minnesota attorney Mary Sharon Andrews, foundation director Teddie Bannon, sexual harassment attorney Julie Patterson, San Francisco journalist Tyler Jones, and Grace Dworkin, who runs a Seattle temp agency, hunker down to talk about their feminist ideals, their lesbian affairs, their careers, and their enduring love for each other. The island is so isolated that there's some cause for disquiet, especially since Tyler and her dog Agatha Christie already have a history of finding dead bodies (Silent Words, 1996). But although the corpse turns up on cue (it's anti-environmentalist lumberman Jordan Blake, to whom no fewer than four of the six women improbably have some sort of tie that might serve as a motive for killing him), the murder does little more than simply refocus already ongoing arguments about child abuse, prostitution, and the need to maintain a radical feminist stance in a treacherously compromised world, arguments that are all, without exception, settled a lot more definitely than the mystery of who killed Jordan Blake. Not so much a whodunit, then, as a what-if-she-did-do-it, with the mystery used to dramatize debates whose outcome is never in doubt.