Kathy Hogan Trocheck’s MIDNIGHT CLEAR is one of her Callahan Garritty series published in 1998. It’s set in Atlanta and surrounding towns during Christmas week. Callahan is a former police detective, now owner of a cleaning company House Mouse. She lives with her mother Edna Mae in the Candler Park neighborhood of Atlanta.
Trocheck does Southern right. Callahan as first person narrator has the story-telling voice of the region, reporting people and attitudes accurately and humorously. “Nobody in our family ever made anything you could call fancy. Our cooking was substantial, solid, Southern. Nobody ever made anything new. Every holiday dinner, every Sunday supper, had a set menu in our family. Thanksgiving meant turkey, Christmas meant ham, Easter was leg of lamb, Monday night was vegetable soup and corn bread, Friday meant macaroni and cheese or Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks. I can still remember the heady feeling that pervaded our kitchen that first time in the early nineties when Edna served chicken burritos. You would have thought she’d discovered penicillin.” (7) And “The Methodists had a good [Vacation Bible School]. They liked to try to convert Catholic kids. We illustrated gospel stories with construction paper and cotton balls and toothpicks and glitter. Methodists were big on glitter.” (274)
Trocheck also excels at using setting and atmosphere to reveal character. “We didn’t call it an amusement park. It was just Funtown. The blue and yellow chevron-shaped sign pointed toward thrills and spills. Cokes over crushed ice drunk from paper cups, the big Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, and tinny music from loudspeakers. It was the place where you went when school was out for the summer, when you’d earned a big treat. I don’t remember the first time my parents took us to Funtown, or the last. I can only remember in between, flashing lights, a big neon clown’s head, feeling dizzy and exhilarated.” (176-7) Characters are believable, including the ambivalent relationships within the Garritty and the Gatlin families: “I thought about how Brian changed when he talked about his daughter. The old cockiness disappeared and his face was suffused with tenderness... His not being man enough to do the right thing [tell Maura her mother’s dead] didn’t bother me, I guess because I’d never expected that much out of him. Because I till didn’t think of him as being a man.” (143)
MIDNIGHT CLEAR opens a week before Christmas when Brian Garritty, Callahan’s younger brother who’s been out of touch with the family since the death of his father ten years before, shows up with his three-year-old daughter Maura. Edna and Callahan had not known of Maura’s existence or of Brian’s marriage to her mother Shay Gatlin, who used to live down the street from them. Shay had spent much time and many meals at the Garritty house because her mother Annette was too busy being the neighborhood tramp to care for her. Shay followed in her mother’s footsteps as an unfit mother, so Brian has taken Maura from Shay, who has custody except for one day every other weekend. He leaves Maura with his family while he gets himself set up to care for her, ignoring Callahan’s good-sense advice that this won’t work. Shay’s murdered, Brian is the major suspect, and Annette goes to war in Clayton County, where her live-in boyfriend is part of the legal mob that runs things, to gain full custody of Maura. To make matters worse, a retired Atlanta Police Department detective, Acey Karpik, ties Shay’s murder to the unsolved murder ten years before of a Jane Doe in the old Funtown area and to a similar death in Henry County, convincing the detectives investigating Shay’s death that Brian is a serial killer. Many secrets emerge as Callahan tries to find evidence to win the custody hearing on Maura and to remove Brian from suspicion.
The plot is fairly set out and has a neat little ironic twist in the epilogue. At 390 pages, the book could have been benefited by judicious editing for length. A couple of improbabilities bothered me. One is the speed with which events occur. Shay is killed on Saturday night, Callahan discovers her body on Sunday morning, and Annette has her funeral at 11 AM Monday. That’s fast even for an expected death from natural causes, much less a murder victim. The other is the willingness of the Jonesboro, Atlanta, and Henry County police departments to take seriously Acey Karpik’s serial killer theory. He’s a retired cop. Not only do they believe him, they appoint a task force and name him as coordinator. Really?
Editing should have picked up on some discrepancies. For instance, what kind of tablecloth does Callahan use for the House Mouse Christmas party? It’s first described as her grandmother’s hand-crocheted lace cloth, then later as damask. Who is the second man who comes to the Garrity house with Annette Gatlin and Chuck Ingraham in her first attempt to take Maura? His description fits neither Ingraham, the lawyer with whom she’s involved, nor Dyson Yount, the realtor/politician with whom Shay’d been sleeping. He doesn’t reappear in the story. What’s the name of Brian’s boss who gives him a partial alibi for the night of Shay’s murder? He’s first mentioned as Randy Pryor, then as Prier, then again as Pryor. These are minor details, but they irritate like hangnails.
Still, MIDNIGHT CLEAR is an enjoyable seasonal read, recommended. (A-)
