DISCOVERING THE BODY

Two years after her testimony helped convict her friend's killer, an Iowa graphic designer faces the possibility that she may have made a mistake.

It was only three days after Linda Garbo came to Linden Grove to be close to Luci Cole, her old friend from art school, that she found Luci's bleeding body in her house moments after she'd just seen Luci's dismissed lover Peter Garvey outside. Linda's spent every day of those two years struggling to live with her memories of what she saw—by marrying Linda's boyfriend Charlie Carpenter, by moving into the house Charlie shared with Luci, by keeping Luci's bedroom undisturbed as a memorial to her. Now the nagging sense that she's being followed starts an ominous chain of events. A mysterious stranger makes Linda a gift of Luci's obscurely written diary; an intruder breaks into her garage; a vandal ruins the intaglio plate on which she's engraved an image of the house to make a present for Charlie. Gradually, beginning with her visit to Peter Garvey, Luci's convicted killer, Linda comes to doubt much of what she's taken for granted about her neighbors, her late friend, and herself. Could she have been wrong in identifying Garvey after all? Was Luci's killer one of the other lovers she evidently collected like so many buttons? Or was her murder tied in to the amphetamine overdose of a local high-school kid—or to a secret from her own past that her diary's been written to conceal instead of illuminating? Realizing that Luci's weaving and Charlie's beekeeping are perfect figures for their nonprofessional lives, Linda has to wonder what the sign outside her own studio—“LINDA GARBO DESIGNS”—says about her.

As metaphors like these suggest, mystery and suspense are less prominent here than the gradual revelation of character that Raymond Chandler insisted was at the heart of any good whodunit.