Transplant to Eastport in `Wicked Fix’

WICKED FIX, by Sarah Graves, Bantam, 290 pages, paperback, $5.99.

From page one to page last, Reuben Tate and his viciousness leave a deliciously slimy trail of nastiness throughout the narrative of “Wicked Fix” (a deadly mix of home repair and homicide, according to the book jacket).

But there’s a woman on the trail and her name is Jacobia Tiptree, an ex-Wall Street investment manager who left New York City for the quieter life of Eastport, Maine. She lives in an 1823 Federal-style house in great need of repairs, with her son, Sam, who is dyslexic. Their dog, Monday, a black Labrador retriever, rounds out the family.

Reuben Tate is a “boy-sized man” who possesses the evil gift of knowing precisely how to find anyone’s weakest point and to use that information to extract what he wants.

He gets his way or he gets even, and when he gets even, someone usually dies. And Reuben always gets away with it.

But in “Wicked Fix,” someone gets even with Reuben. He is discovered dead in the cemetery.

On the same morning, in another part of Eastport, Weasel Bodine is also found murdered. And when an antique scalpel is found missing, Jacobia’s ex-husband, brain surgeon Victor Tiptree, becomes the prime suspect.

Jacobia has her hands full now.

The roof in her old house is leaking and has left a stain shaped like Africa on the ceiling. She has several dozen poorly fitting windows to finish weatherstripping before winter sets in. Sam is teaching himself Morse code so he can communicate with whoever is haunting their house. And unless she can prove that Victor didn’t murder Reuben and Weasel, she will lose money she invested in the trauma center Victor had planned to open.

But Jacobia gets a lot of help from her friends, native Eastporters Ellie White and Wade Sorenson, who is also Jacobia’s main man. She has plenty of suspects, too, since everyone in Eastport hated Reuben. They are glad he’s dead. Eventually, her list of suspects includes an assortment of characters who keep Jacobia busy asking all sorts of shrewd questions that lead only to (pardon the pun) dead ends.

Then she, too, becomes a target. Her dog is injured in a trap. Someone empties her car’s gas tank. And Sam, when he experiments with an Ouija board, channels the words deaddeaddead.

Jacobia’s investigation leads her, in time, to the killer, but not before she and her friends find themselves in dire straits involving lighter fluid, Fourth of July sparklers, and blocks of wax. Wanting to know how they get out of their wicked fix is a plot twist that kept me reading.

Sarah Graves’ lively and fast-paced writing grabbed my attention with the first sentence of “Wicked Fix”: “I don’t see why Reuben Tate had to come back to town at all.” I had to know what Ellie meant by that and was hooked right away. At the end of every chapter Graves left me dangling on so fine a thread it made me eager to read on.

I especially liked the author’s wit, which pops up at pleasant intervals throughout the book and balances tense scenes. I even looked forward to it:

“The rule, when dealing with Victor, is never wrestle with a pig; you both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

“To George, the french fry is about as foreign as food needs to get, with the possible exception of the English muffin.”

“I could get a cab in the rain, a good table at Four Seasons, or a bagel so fresh that just by eating it, you could learn whole phrases of vernacular Yiddish.”

On my Gory Detail scale (0 the low, 10 the high), I give Graves a 1 for sparing me a technicolor description of the murders. On my Sin and Skin scale, I give her a 0 for finding clever and witty ways to describe the chemistry percolating between Jacobia and Wade without baring it all.

You can give this book to your grandmother and not be afraid of giving offense.

I also liked the map of the Eastport area.

I found several minor technical things to nitpick. I wish the author had told me how to pronounce Jacobia — is it Jack-O-be-ah or Jacko-BE-ah? And on when a character is sent to buy a half-pint of Seagram’s — in Maine in the 1970s, wasn’t liquor sold only in state-run stores? Did Eastport still have bootleggers in the late 1970s? Was Seagram’s ever sold in half-pints? Not a biggy, but it made me wonder.

Then there’s the typographical glitch on page 186. Jacobia is kayaking with Heywood when all of a sudden, Marcus, who isn’t in the scene, says, “Hello.” Very confusing.

Sarah Graves lives in Eastport in an 1823 Federal-style house. She is the author of two other Mainely Mystery books, “The Dead Cat Bounce” and “Triple Witch.”