‘Home Repair’ series mystery well-built

MALLETS AFORETHOUGHT, by Sarah Graves, Bantam, New York, 2004, hardcover, 352 pages, $21.95.

Only Sarah Graves could come up with a locked-room mystery that involved house renovations.

The Eastport author returns with the seventh volume in her “Home Repair is Homicide” mystery series, and again transplant Jacobia Tiptree and her native friend, Ellie White, find themselves with another baffling murder to solve.

This case begins when the pair, working on a famed old mansion for a fund-raiser, stumble on a hidden room, which holds the remains of a 1920s-era flapper and a more recent deposit – the town’s most despised man, who had been poisoned.

Their investigation takes on a special urgency after Ellie’s husband, George, who threatened the man in public recently, gets arrested for the murder.

The novel has Graves’ usual blend of helpful household tips mixed into a vat of red herrings. The challenge is for the reader to pick out the murderer ahead of Jake, who’s working largely alone this time in order to spare further stress to her extremely expectant friend.

“Mallets Aforethought” isn’t Graves’ most challenging mystery, but she doesn’t hammer readers over the head with the killer’s identity. Nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable read for those who like their mysteries well-built. – Dale McGarrigle

DIVIDED WE FALL: THE STORY OF THE PAPERWORKERS’ UNION AND THE FUTURE OF LABOR by Peter Kellman, The Apex Press, New York, 2004, 194 pages, $29.95.

In 1987, Peter Kellman was assigned by the Maine AFL-CIO to help striking paperworkers in Jay in their disastrous battle against the International Paper Company.

“When the strike was lost, I felt a responsibility to study and document the struggle, so I could explain the defeat to myself and my brothers and sisters,” explains Kellman in his introduction to this book. Rather than a balanced history, the result is a polemic as well as a guide on how to reinvigorate organized labor.

Kellman’s intentions are didactic: “People and social movements learn from their mistakes and successes. But histories of workers’ movements are rarely told and usually lost. By uncovering the history of the paperworkers’ struggles in the first four decades of the twentieth century, I began to understand why the strike of 1987-88 was lost.”

Today Kellman is affiliated with the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, which the book cover identifies as “a group of activists investigating and disseminating the history of democracy and corporate power.”

His book aims to help a movement that has been in trouble for years. Unionization peaked in 1953 at 26 percent of the work force and by 2002 dropped to 13.2 percent, Kellman says.

He concludes, “We need a new framework to view our history and a militant, radical, democratic movement to resist the tyranny of today’s corporate elite. This movement needs to build a collective vision of a new society based on the needs, aspirations and survival of the inhabitants of this planet. This would lead us to a society very unlike the one we have today which is based on the liberty of the few to exploit the many.” – Wayne Reilly

THE BODY IN THE ATTIC, by Katherine Hall Page, William Morrow, New York, 2004, hardcover, 227 pages, $23.95.

Katherine Hall Page, a summer resident of Deer Isle, offers a different kind of fish-out-of-water tale in her latest Faith Fairchild mystery.

Page’s delightful creation, Faith Fairchild, is a caterer and amateur sleuth. An expatriate New Yorker, Faith is still adjusting to suburban Aleford, Mass., where her minister husband Tom’s parish is located, after a dozen years.

Tom has grown disenchanted with parish life. So he takes a leave to teach at the Harvard Divinity School and work with Boston’s homeless, before consulting with Faith.

Faith has mixed feelings about moving back to a metropolitan area. After all, Boston isn’t New York. Also she worries about uprooting their two young children for a semester, and wonders if she may be leaving Aleford for good.

Faith soon has a couple of mysteries on her hands. She meets up again with Richard Morgan, her beau before Tom, at a soup kitchen, and they soon re-establish a furtive friendship. Then he disappears. Also she discovers a diary written by a former resident of the house in which they’re staying, including the woman’s horrific story.

“The Body in the Attic” is a low-key and at times frustrating read, but Page neatly ties it all together with a flurry of revelations near the end. It’s not a whodunit, but it’s still an intriguing whole. – Dale McGarrigle