Review: Easy Innocence by Libby Fischer Hellmann

July 19, 3:33 PMChicago Freelance Writing ExaminerMaryan Pelland

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Author Libby Fischer Hellman is hip to her genre’s best features, and spot-on in constructing a wonderful sense of place in her detective novels. Easy Innocence, featuring Hellmann’s recurring woman private investigator Georgia Davis, setsup the exclusive Chicago North Shore almost as a star character. That’s an interesting value for readers connected to Chicago and an armchair journey for others.

In Easy Innocence, Hellmann does what an effective and polished novelist must do – creates an opening that draws readers in and won’t let go. The first sentence - Long after she moved on, she would remember the smells. - sets pace and depth. Now, the reader moves past the well-buffed façade of upper-middle class suburbia. Beneath, is a seedy world of teenage prostitution, indulgent parents, victimization of people who are different from their neighbors, and of murderers who kill because they can.

Hellmann’s novel opens with a teenager sinking too far into muck she has chosen to step gingerly around as she covets clothes, jewelry, and privileges that come easily to her wealthier friends. The scene turns to a high school sports rally turning deadly. Sara Long is bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and her best friends are all nearby. Though Cam Jordan, a reclusive autistic man known to pleasure himself by peeping at people, seems the prime suspect it’s evident he’s a Boo Radley. The political establishment rushes toward a whitewash conviction. Davis is called upon to figure out who’s trying to hook the red herring. She must save Cam by uncovering the real killer. What is the killer hiding and what’s lurking under the tinsel trappings of an exclusive bedroom community? Davis learns the community fears the real answers.

Davis, building her PI business, wrestles with empathetic personal issues while she risks her life. The ex-cop, still puzzling out her feelings about being ousted from the PD after ten years of service, dodges bullets while trying to keep professionally distant from dysfunctional families of suspects and witnesses. Trying to dowse the fire of an old love affair, she finds herself engulfed in literal flames as someone eerily familiar begins to stalk her.

It’s a pleasure to follow Hellman’s thinking and plotting – she’s got a knack for weaving threads together in a most satisfying way. Motivations are believable, characters react appropriately but not predictably, and the author devotes enough time to description and backstory so readers aren’t lost. She’s smart enough to set boundaries with those conventions so the story doesn’t become mired in minutia.

Easy Innocence is complicated enough. The setting is alive and compellingly filled with contrasts of dark and light, good and evil where we might expect only the trappings of success and social acceptance. The strong point is character development that gifts readers with seemingly real people to follow through a maze of whodunit conventions. Ultimately, Hellmann may have erred in letting go of potential suspense by telegraphing who didn’t do it, right off the bat. But this handily put together detective novel is one of those that makes you wish for more after the turn of the final page.