A POETIC PUZZLE

A failed poet must solve a puzzle left by a famous poet of the same name in McLaughlin’s bookish mystery novel.

There are two women named Mary Irene Jones: One is a world-renowned yet reclusive Irish poet; the other—who goes by Mimi—is a decidedly nonfamous American poet 25 years Mary Irene’s junior. Ironically, Mimi now works as an adjunct professor at the same Philadelphia-area university where Mary Irene once taught. (Indeed, Mimi only got her job at said university because someone in human resources thought she was Mary Irene.) When a box of Mary Irene’s unpublished manuscripts arrives at Mimi’s house, then, she isn’t exactly surprised…though she is taken aback when a police detective shows up a few days later. It seems Mary Irene has gone missing—bank accounts emptied, car vanished, calls straight to voicemail—but she’s left a letter making it very clear that she wants Mimi, specifically, to “safeguard” her manuscripts “as [she] would [her] own.” The poems seem to hold clues to a mystery that Mary Irene wants solved—and not just the question of her whereabouts. With the help of the handsome detective Michael Quinn, Mimi must delve deeply into the verses of her famous namesake, attempting to figure out the inscrutable woman—and, along the way, to figure out herself as well. McLaughlin’s elegant prose weaves a neat literary mystery in which Mimi must bring her scholastic sleuthing skills to bear on Mary Irene’s enigmatic lines. “I turned the page and saw a date, also in MIJ’s handwriting: May 1, 1974,” Mimi narrates after perusing one piece of juvenilia. “She would have been thirteen years old, but that didn’t ring quite true. The words ached in a much older voice, carrying a weariness that seemed seasoned much longer.” Balancing the bookishness is the budding romantic tension between Mimi and Detective Quinn. This is a cozy mystery for those who love the printed word, one that cleverly plays with the relationship between author and reader and the division between literature and real life.

An imaginative and immersive literary mystery.