Retro Friday: Joanne Dobson

Angie started this wonderful feature called Retro Fridays – the point being to talk about books that aren’t so new, maybe even out of print, but books that you loved for whatever reason, and haven’t forgotten after perhaps even years and years. So…That’s what I’m going to do today, and my Retro Friday is going to feature author Joanne Dobson.

In 1997, during my evening shift at a small bookstore, I came across the first in a new academic mystery series called Quieter Than Sleep. We got no more than two copies in to be shelved but, after reading the back cover, I snagged one for myself.

It got put aside for weeks only to be pulled it out during a family road trip of sorts. This book – actually several in this series – became one associated with sense memories for me. Reading it is etched so firmly in my mind, I can easily recall where I was, what I was doing, what I was eating, etc. And I distinctly remember being thoroughly engrossed in the novel. Quieter Than Sleep introduces Karen Pelletier, a professor at Massachusetts’ fictional Enfield College and single mother, whose “literary passion” was Emily Dickinson. After one of her colleagues is murdered – perhaps because he discovered something huge about Dickinson  – Karen takes up the role of unwilling sleuth, and meets one Lieutenant Piotrowski.

The stage was set perfectly in that first book for those that followed. And those that followed? I devoured. I was so into The Raven and the Nightengale that I almost didn’t get to the building on time for a poetry event at which I had been chosen to read.

But then, after The Maltese Manuscript, my favorite of the series, they just stopped. Nothing had been resolved in that last book, nothing to make it seem as though it would indeed be the last of Karen Pelletier, and I felt bereft. For years after, I kept searching for news of the series, of Joanne Dobson, and found none. A part of me still holds out hope that maybe there’ll be another book coming. Because they were that good, because they made me care about Karen, Piotrowski, all the regulars, and because they warmed me whenever I read them.

I’m pretty sure that the first three or four books in this series have gone out of print, and so I cherish my copies all the more. They have a definite, permanent place on my keeper shelf, and I urge you, if you do come across one somewhere, pick it up. I think you might enjoy it.

Quieter Than Sleep | The Northbury Papers | The Raven and the Nightengale | Cold and Pure and Very Dead | The Maltese Manuscript