MOONSHADOWS by Julie Whitesel WestonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story,” said Anton Chekhov. “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.”
Julie Weston’s MOONSHADOWS rises to Chekhov’s standards. Packed with rich details of history, geography, and character, MOONSHADOWS is a delightful and absorbing mystery. Nellie Burns is the perfect imperfect first-wave feminist heroine: determined to negotiate her own way—sometimes with nearly fatal results—as she faces the raw power of nature and the rough realities of frontier life in 1920s Idaho. Nellie is determined, too, to make sure the things she learns about tolerance and trust in a town that has plenty of ethnic tensions are passed on to others. Her stubborn insistence on testing her talents and courage leads her to err at times, but it is this same trait that sees her through solving the puzzle of what appears to be a double murder before she herself can be counted among the corpses.
And in the process, she establishes herself not only as an emerging detective, but as a gifted photographer.
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