CARPOOL

Erma Bombeck meets Angela Lansbury with unfortunate results in this suburban mystery featuring a carpooling mom, a dead farmer, a stone-faced Indian detective, and an assortment of aimlessly adulterous bit players—all manipulated with amateurish enthusiasm by this veteran carpooler and first-time Baltimore writer. The schedule is clipped to the car's visor with a clothespin: swim practice, breakfast, kindergarten drop-off, elementary-school drop-off, high-school drop-off, SaveMart, shoe repair, lunch at Wendy's with the girls, then pick-ups, after-school activities, dinner, and bed. Jenny Meade, once a pilot and co-owner of her own medical-transport business, has been reduced by marriage and childbearing to life in a Honda hatchback, daydreaming between jaunts of long-gone adventures in a Piper Cherokee and engaging in conversation with her dog. Much maligned by her children and ignored by her husband, Jenny finds relief when she discovers an apparent suicide in a graveyard near her daughter's school and can occupy her mind with suspicions of foul play. The detective on the case—morose, deadpan Thomas Black Cloud—asks the roadbound housewife to keep an eye out for clues. This is all the encouragement Jenny needs: while speeding across the suburban-rural countryside, she not only solves Cloud's case but manages also to resolve her marital problems, reestablish her former career, solve the lingering mystery of her own parents' death a decade earlier, and learn—difficult as it is—to leave the driving to others. Cahill stumbles repeatedly in her eagerness to seduce the reader—a failed effort, though likely to engage the sympathies of other carpoolers across the country.