Review: A Gourmet Treat
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 13, 2014
I have to admit that I'm a big fan of mysteries whose solution depends on long ago events whose consequences surface in the present day. For that reason, I was predisposed to like Carmen DeSousa's novelette length tale, "The Pit Stop." Even when the author added some supernatural elements that didn't quite work, the story was still a taste treat.Stripped of its supernatural elements, the story is a pretty good mystery about a set of murders rooted deeply in the past. Detective Gino Canale's grandparents had died mysteriously one night twenty years earlier, and he becomes suspicious when another couple who live in a nearby town die under nearly the same circumstances. There doesn't appear to be foul play involved in either case, but the coincidence is too much for Gino, especially when he learns that his grandparents and the dead couple had known each other in high school some fifty years ago.It's not giving too much away to say that the deaths of both couples are in fact murders and are connected. Gino and another detective from the other town who also has ties to the investigation eventually put all the pieces together, and the solution is quite logical. With a story this short, there's a limited amount of investigating and a limited number of suspects (the killer should be easy to guess), so the story may be a bit disappointing for those who enjoy more intricate mysteries. However, in my view, the ingenuity of the plotting made up for the relative lack of complication in the mystery itself.However, "The Pit Stop" is not merely a straightforward mystery of some small town crimes. Instead, it starts out with some possibly supernatural imagery, as Gino Canale is haunted by recurring nightmares in which his dead grandparents appear. It doesn't take a Freud to figure out that these nightmares might have a rational explanation... namely a man whose police training causes him to doubt the official explanation of the deaths and which doubts manifest themselves in his dreams. Or, of course, there might be a supernatural explanation as well.Carmen de Sousa writes novels that include elements of romance, suspense, mystery, and the supernatural, which is easier to accomplish in 300 pages rather than the 30 of this story. This story has the right feel and atmosphere but her efforts to blend the normal and paranormal don't quite work. She deliberately leaves the paranormal questions unanswered, so that readers won't be burdened with an, of necessity, rushed explanation of those events. Still, in my view, the supernatural elements were a time-consuming distraction in an already tightly plotted story.All in all, this is quite an effective story and an entertaining mystery. de Sousa has also surrounded her story in an atmosphere that differs significantly from the "just the facts" style of police work one often finds in a story like this. The result is a story that feels longer (in a good way) than it actually is. While it's a story that in my view would have worked even better if the paranormal had been replaced with additional layers of plot complications to be unraveled, "The Pit Stop" is one of the more effective mysteries of this length I've read in quite a while. Although the titular restaurant in this story is a roadside diner, Carmen de Sousa has concocted a gourmet treat for her readers.