-The Spellman Series, Book One-
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007)
Hardcover, 358 Pages, Fiction
From the Cover: Meet Isabel “Izzy” Spellman, private investigator. This twenty-eight-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking, and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to Get Smart reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors—but the upshot is she’s good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family’s firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people’s privacy comes naturally to Izzy. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman. Part Nancy Drew, part Dirty Harry, Izzy walks an indistinguishable line between Spellman family member and Spellman employee. Duties include: completing assignments from the bosses, a.k.a. Mom and Dad (preferably without scrutiny); appeasing her chronically perfect lawyer brother (often under duress); setting an example for her fourteen-year-old sister, Rae (who’s become addicted to “recreational surveillance”); and tracking down her uncle (who randomly disappears on benders dubbed “Lost Weekends”). But when Izzy’s parents hire Rae to follow her (for the purpose of ascertaining the identity of Izzy’s new boyfriend), Izzy snaps and decides that the only way she will ever be normal is if she gets out of the family business. But there’s a hitch: she must take one last job before they’ll let her go—a fifteen-year-old, ice-cold missing person case. She accepts, only to experience a disappearance far closer to home, which becomes the most important case of her life.
My Review: So, as I’ve said twice now on my blog, I belong to a discussion board book thread where The Spellman Files all of a sudden became all the rage, and rather than get run over by the bandwagon I decided to jump on … and I’m glad I did.
I think I had more fun reading this book than any other book so far this year. What Lutz has done in The Spellman Files is create a cast of some of the quirkiest characters this side of Elmore Leonard and infused it with a tongue-in-cheek sensibility that makes it a pure delight to read.
If pressed, I’d have to say that my favorite aspect of the novel was either Lutz’s protagonist, Izzy and all of her strangely and simultaneously dysfunctional and completely rational approaches to family and friends and dating and employment; that, or Izzy’s little sister Rae who is easily of the greatest teenage characters not currently enrolled in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (though one can only imagine the problems Rae would give Argus Filch and Severus Snape as she prowled the castle’s corridors after hours). Rae’s “this is what ‘normal’ people do” approach to everything from extorting money out of relatives and conducting surveillance on both relatives and complete strangers is so over-the-top and absolutely ridiculous making it a brilliant parody of such beloved childhood literary characters as Harriet the Spy, Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew. I loved every minute of it.
I do have to wonder, though, if Lutz’s approach to Izzy’s character isn’t a little reductive at times. Perhaps it is just the literary grad student in me coming out to strongly but it gave me pause that Lutz constructs such a strong character as Izzy and then reduces her quest for happiness and fulfillment to something as simple as finding a boyfriend to settle down with. That seems counterproductive to me, but perhaps I am over analyzing. Once it’s turned on, the literary critic is hard to turn off.
Over all, though, this was a lot of fun to read, and—as I said at the outset—I am glad I jumped on the bandwagon rather than letting it run me over, because I would have missed out. So, come on, jump on the bandwagon, have some of the Kool Aid (it’s delicious) and check out The Spellman Files, you won’t be disappointed.
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